Database Design - ER Modeling (Advanced)

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from the lecture on advanced ER modeling concepts in database design.

Entity-Relationship Modeling

A modeling technique used in database design to represent the structure of a database.

Crow’s Foot notation

A graphical representation used in ER modeling to depict entities, attributes, and relationships.

Attribute

A characteristic or property of an entity.

Connectivity

Describes how entities are associated in a relationship (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many).

Cardinality

Expresses the minimum and maximum number of entity occurrences associated with one occurrence of the related entity.

Weak Entity

An entity that cannot exist without another entity.

Strong Entity

An entity that can exist independently of other entities.

Strong (Identifying) Relationship

A relationship where the primary key of the related entity contains a primary key component of the parent entity.

Weak (Non-Identifying) Relationship

A relationship where the primary key of the related entity does not contain a primary key component of the parent entity.

Composite Entity

An entity that represents a many-to-many relationship between two or more entities.

Supertype

A more general entity type that can have subtypes.

Subtype

A more specific entity type that inherits attributes from its supertype.

Specialization

The process of defining one or more subtypes of a supertype.

Generalization

The process of defining a general entity type from a set of specialized entity types.

Specialization Hierarchy

Depicts the arrangement of higher-level supertypes and lower-level subtypes.

Subtype Discriminator

An attribute in the supertype that determines to which subtype the supertype instance is related.

Disjoint Subtypes

Subtypes that contain a unique subset of the supertype entity set.

Overlapping Subtypes

Subtypes that contain non-unique subsets of the supertype entity set.

Primary Key

A key that ensures each record is uniquely identifiable and should not carry embedded meaning.

Natural Key

A real-world, generally accepted identifier for real-world objects.

Surrogate Key

A artificially created key, particularly when a natural key isn't suitable.