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Chapter: Fundamentals of Database Systems : Conceptual Modeling and Database Design : Data Modeling Using the Entity-Relationship (ER) Model

Weak Entity Types

Entity types that do not have key attributes of their own are called weak entity types. In contrast, regular entity types that do have a key attribute—which include all the examples discussed so far—are called strong entity types.

Weak Entity Types

 

Entity types that do not have key attributes of their own are called weak entity types. In contrast, regular entity types that do have a key attribute—which include all the examples discussed so far—are called strong entity types. Entities belonging to a weak entity type are identified by being related to specific entities from another entity type in combination with one of their attribute values. We call this other entity type the identifying or owner entity type,10 and we call the relationship type that relates a weak entity type to its owner the identifying relationship of the weak entity type.11 A weak entity type always has a total participation constraint (existence dependency) with respect to its identifying relationship because a weak entity can-not be identified without an owner entity. However, not every existence dependency results in a weak entity type. For example, a DRIVER_LICENSE entity cannot exist unless it is related to a PERSON entity, even though it has its own key (License_number) and hence is not a weak entity.

 

Consider the entity type DEPENDENT, related to EMPLOYEE, which is used to keep track of the dependents of each employee via a 1:N relationship (Figure 7.2). In our example, the attributes of DEPENDENT are Name (the first name of the dependent), Birth_date, Sex, and Relationship (to the employee). Two dependents of two distinct employees may, by chance, have the same values for Name, Birth_date, Sex, and Relationship, but they are still distinct entities. They are identified as distinct entities only after determining the particular employee entity to which each dependent is related. Each employee entity is said to own the dependent entities that are related to it.

 

A weak entity type normally has a partial key, which is the attribute that can uniquely identify weak entities that are related to the same owner entity.12 In our example, if we assume that no two dependents of the same employee ever have the same first name, the attribute Name of DEPENDENT is the partial key. In the worst case, a composite attribute of all the weak entity’s attributes will be the partial key.

 

In ER diagrams, both a weak entity type and its identifying relationship are distinguished by surrounding their boxes and diamonds with double lines (see Figure 7.2). The partial key attribute is underlined with a dashed or dotted line.

 

Weak entity types can sometimes be represented as complex (composite, multivalued) attributes. In the preceding example, we could specify a multivalued attribute Dependents for EMPLOYEE, which is a composite attribute with component attributes Name, Birth_date, Sex, and Relationship. The choice of which representation to use is made by the database designer. One criterion that may be used is to choose the weak entity type representation if there are many attributes. If the weak entity participates independently in relationship types other than its identifying relationship type, then it should not be modeled as a complex attribute.

 

In general, any number of levels of weak entity types can be defined; an owner entity type may itself be a weak entity type. In addition, a weak entity type may have more than one identifying entity type and an identifying relationship type of degree higher than two, as we illustrate in Section 7.9.


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Fundamentals of Database Systems : Conceptual Modeling and Database Design : Data Modeling Using the Entity-Relationship (ER) Model : Weak Entity Types |


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