An Entity merely represents something you want to keep a list of. Two lists can exist that have a relationship with each other - for example Student (a list) enrols in (a relationship) Course (a list). Of course a student can enrol in many courses and a course can have many students enroled in it. Therefore the relationship between Student to Course is "many to many". Many to many relationships between entitities in a relational database management system are resolved by placing a third entity between the entities involved. In ER diagrams this is noted by drawing a box around the relationship diamond - thus promoting the relationship to an "associative entity". The cardinality of the two orignial entities ("many to many") is removed. New cardinality ("one to many") between the outer entities (Student and Course) and the associative entity (Student.Course) with the many towards the associative entity. The data in the associative entity - from the above example - tells us which student is enrolled in which course. (In the following illustration, please ignore underscores. They just space the words out. "{" and "}" denote many) : Entity_____Associative Entity____Entity : STUDENT -------{STUDENT.COURSE }----COURSE : Fred_________ Fred.Math__________ Math : Sally_________ Fred.Science________Science : Gus__________Gus.Math___________Cooking : _____________Gus.Cooking : _____________Sally.Math : In a real database the values recorded in the STUDENT.COURSE table would not be student names and course titles. They would be the primary key values from the STUDENT and COURSE tables. The benefits of this design are:
1) The student is only recorded once which helps minimise data errors.
2) The course is only recorded once which helps minimise data errors.
3) Students can enrol in many courses and courses can have many students enrolledd.
An associative entity is used to represent a many-to-many relationship between two or more entities in a database, while a relationship with attribute represents additional information or properties about the relationship itself. In other words, an associative entity helps in resolving many-to-many relationships, while a relationship with attribute adds details about the connections between entities.
Associative entities are used in Entity-Relationship (ER) models to represent relationships between two or more entities. They help to model complex relationships that have attributes of their own. By using associative entities, we can accurately capture the associations between the main entities and represent them in a clear and normalized way.
many to many
Entity-Relationship diagrams are useful for modelling data and the relationships between the data. They can be used when the constraints between data are relatively simple. They do not allow specification of interactions between the data or model how the data changes (there are no processes in Entity-Relationship). Entity-Relationship diagrams are most often used to model databases.
mandatory and optional
ENHANCED ENTITY RELATIONSHIP OR EXTENDED ENTITY RELATIONSHIP
An intersection entity is used in a database when there is a many-to-many relationship between two entities. It serves as a bridge table to resolve the many-to-many relationship by breaking it into two one-to-many relationships. Each record in the intersection entity represents a combination of records from the two related entities.
An entity relationship diagram for hotel reservation systems is a map of each entity or thing that has a part in the process of hotel reservations. The diagram maps the relationship between each entity of the process.
it is an entity whose primary key is composed of the combination of the primary keys of the entities that must be linked. It is used in linking tables of the M:N relationship that needs to be converted into two 1:M relationship for your database
An entity relationship diagram (ERD) represents the entities, or groups of information, and their relationships maintained for a business. An entity relationship diagram represents the entities, or groups of information, and their relationships maintained for a business. An entity relationship diagram represents the entities, or groups of information, and their relationships maintained for a business.
Entity Relationship Diagram, or ERD.
In contrast to the strong or regular entity, a weak entity is one that meets two conditions: 1. The entity is existence-dependent; that is, it cannot exist without the entity with which it has a relationship. 2. The entity has a primary key that is partially or totally derived from the parent entity in the relationship.