Relationships, Entities and Database Design - Intermediate Entities
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It is often possible to conceptually simplify many-to-many relationships by replacing the many-to-many relationship with a new intermediate entity (sometimes called an associate entity) and connecting the original entities through a many-to-one and a one-to-many relationship.
Figure 4-7. A passenger participates in an M:N relationship with flight
Figure 4-8. The intermediate booking entity between the passenger and flight entities
Consider the statement: “A passenger can book a seat on a flight.” This is a many-to-many relationship between the entities “passenger” and “flight.” The related ER diagram fragment is shown in Figure 4-7.
However, let’s look at this from both sides of the relationship:
- Any given flight can have many passengers with a booking.
- Any given passenger can have bookings on many flights.
Hence, we can consider the many-to-many relationship to be in fact two one-to-many relationships, one each way. This points us to the existence of a hidden intermediate entity, the booking, between the flight and the passenger entities. The requirement could be better worded as: “A passenger can make a booking for a seat on a flight.” The related ER diagram fragment is shown in Figure 4-8.
Each passenger can be involved in multiple bookings, but each booking belongs to a single passenger, so the cardinality of this relationship is 1:N. Similarly, there can be many bookings for a given flight, but each booking is for a single flight, so this relationship also has cardinality 1:N. Since each booking must be associated with a particular passenger and flight, the booking entity participates totally in the relationships with these entities. This total participation could not be captured effectively in the representation in Figure 4-7. (We described partial and total participation earlier in “Partial and Total Participation .”)
Weak and Strong Entities
Context is very important in our daily interactions; if we know the context, we can work with a much smaller amount of information. For example, we generally call family members by only their first name or nickname. Where ambiguity exists, we add further information such as the surname to clarify our intent. In database design, we can omit some key information for entities that are dependent on other entities. For example, if we wanted to store the names of our customers’ children, we could create a child entity and store only enough key information to identify it in the context of its parent. We could simply list a child’s first name on the assumption that a customer will never have several children with the same first name. Here, the child entity is a weak entity, and its relationship with the customer entity is called an identifying relationship. Weak entities participate totally in the identifying relationship, since they can’t exist in the database independently of their owning entity.
In the ER diagram, we show weak entities and identifying relationships with double lines, and the partial key of a weak entity with a dashed underline, as in Figure 4-9. A weak entity is uniquely identified in the context of its regular (or strong) entity, and so the full key for a weak entity is the combination of its own (partial) key with the key of its owning entity. To uniquely identify a child in our example, we need the first name of the child and the email address of the child’s parent.
Figure 4-10 shows a summary of the symbols we’ve explained for ER diagrams.
Next: Entity Relationship Modeling Examples >>
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 This article is excerpted from chapter 4 of the book Learning MySQL, written by Seyed M.M. "Saied" Tahaghoghi and Hugh E. Williams (O'Reilly, 2006; ISBN: 0596008643). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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