Subclasses, Superclasses, and Inheritance

Subclasses, Superclasses, and Inheritance

The EER model includes all the modeling concepts of the ER model that were presented in Chapter 7. In addition, it includes the concepts of subclass and superclass and the related concepts of specialization and generalization (see Sections 8.2 and 8.3). Another concept included in the EER model is that of a category or union type (see Section 8.4), which is used to represent a collection of objects (entities) that is the union of objects of different entity types. Associated with these concepts is the important mechanism of attribute and relationship inheritance. Unfortunately, no standard terminology exists for these concepts, so we use the most common terminology. Alternative terminology is given in foot-notes. We also describe a diagrammatic technique for displaying these concepts when they arise in an EER schema. We call the resulting schema diagrams enhanced ER or EER diagrams.

The first Enhanced ER (EER) model concept we take up is that of a subtype or subclass of an entity type. As we discussed in Chapter 7, an entity type is used to represent both a type of entity and the entity set or collection of entities of that type that exist in the database. For example, the entity type EMPLOYEE describes the type (that is, the attributes and relationships) of each employee entity, and also refers to the current set of EMPLOYEE entities in the COMPANY database. In many cases an entity type has numerous subgroupings or subtypes of its entities that are meaning-ful and need to be represented explicitly because of their significance to the database application. For example, the entities that are members of the EMPLOYEE entity type may be distinguished further into SECRETARY, ENGINEER, MANAGER,

TECHNICIAN, SALARIED_EMPLOYEE, HOURLY_EMPLOYEE, and so on. The set of entities in each of the latter groupings is a subset of the entities that belong to the EMPLOYEE entity set, meaning that every entity that is a member of one of these subgroupings is also an employee. We call each of these subgroupings a subclass or subtype of the EMPLOYEE entity type, and the EMPLOYEE entity type is called the superclass or supertype for each of these subclasses. Figure 8.1 shows how to repre-sent these concepts diagramatically in EER diagrams. (The circle notation in Figure 8.1 will be explained in Section 8.2.)

We call the relationship between a superclass and any one of its subclasses a superclass/subclass or supertype/subtype or simply class/subclass relationship.

In our previous example, EMPLOYEE/SECRETARY and EMPLOYEE/TECHNICIAN are two class/subclass relationships. Notice that a member entity of the subclass repre-sents the same real-world entity as some member of the superclass; for example, a SECRETARY entity ‘Joan Logano’ is also the EMPLOYEE ‘Joan Logano.’ Hence, the subclass member is the same as the entity in the superclass, but in a distinct specific role. When we implement a superclass/subclass relationship in the database system, however, we may represent a member of the subclass as a distinct database object— say, a distinct record that is related via the key attribute to its superclass entity. In Section 9.2, we discuss various options for representing superclass/subclass relationships in relational databases.

An entity cannot exist in the database merely by being a member of a subclass; it must also be a member of the superclass. Such an entity can be included optionally as a member of any number of subclasses. For example, a salaried employee who is also an engineer belongs to the two subclasses ENGINEER and SALARIED_EMPLOYEE of the EMPLOYEE entity type. However, it is not necessary that every entity in a superclass is a member of some subclass.

An important concept associated with subclasses (subtypes) is that of type inheritance. Recall that the type of an entity is defined by the attributes it possesses and the relationship types in which it participates. Because an entity in the subclass rep-resents the same real-world entity from the superclass, it should possess values for its specific attributes as well as values of its attributes as a member of the superclass. We say that an entity that is a member of a subclass inherits all the attributes of the entity as a member of the superclass. The entity also inherits all the relationships in which the superclass participates. Notice that a subclass, with its own specific (or local) attributes and relationships together with all the attributes and relationships it inherits from the superclass, can be considered an entity type in its own right.