Database Design (Cambridge (CIE) A Level Computer Science) : Revision Note

Entity-relationship (E-R) diagrams

What is an entity?

• An entity in something worthy of capturing and storing data about e.g. students, orders, products, courses, customers

• Entities become tables in a relational database

• Relational databases store different entities in separate tables

• Linking tables depends on the relationships between entities

• There are 3 types of (sometimes called degrees of) relationships:

  • One-to-one

  • One-to-many

  • Many-to-many

• Imagine a company has 

  • A table of products

  • A table of customers

  • A table of the orders the customers have made

• What is the relationship between a customer and an order?

  • One customer can make multiple (many) orders

  • But each order relates to a specific (one) customer

  • So the relationship between customer and order is one-to-many

• Now consider the relationship between a product and an order

  • An order could have more than one (many) products on it

  • A product could be on more than one (many) order

  • So the relationship between order and product is many-to-many

• One-to-one relationships also exist but are not very common in databases

What is an entity-relationship (E-R) diagram?

• An entity relationship diagram (E-R) is a diagram that represents the entities (tables) that will be in a database and the relationships between these entities

• The entities are drawn as boxes with the entity name in

• The relationships are drawn in as what is known as ‘crow’s feet notation’

• This is how to draw the relationships in the exam:

• The names of the entities would go inside the boxes