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a collection of entities,

relationships among entities.

Entity: A real-world object that can be distinctly identified may represent
some real physical object.
E.g., Satish is a government employee; Kareena Kapoor is an actress;
my car is a Honda City. It May also represent some conceptual idea
E.g., SC304 is a course; Semester 1 2001/2002 is a semester
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Example: specific person, company, event, plant
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Example: set of all persons, companies, trees, holidays.
u An entity is represented by a set of
attributes, that is, descriptive properties possessed
by all members of an entity set. (value from
corresponding entity)
Example: customer = (customer-name, social-security,
customer-street, customer-city) account = (account-
number, balance)

 ± the set of permitted values for each attribute
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D Simple and composite attributes.
D Single-valued and multi-valued attributes
D Null attributes
D Derived attributes
D Identifiers(Key) attributes
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Simple attributes are atomic.E.g. tel_ph; house color; basic-salary;
Composite attributes made up of simple attributes. E.g., address =
(St_add,city,state, postal code)
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Single valued: single value associated with an attribute
Multivalued: may have more than one values. E.g., University
degree attribute may contain B.Eng., M.Eng., or Ph.D.
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D Most attribute values are stored eg birthdate. BUT Derived from
stored value. E.g., age from birth date
[ : An attribute takes a null value when an entity does not have a
value for it. eg house_no

  An attribute (or combination of attributes) that
uniquely identifies the instances of an entity type.
Identifiers will not change in value, will not be null. No intelligent
Identifiers( containing people or locations that might change).
D A x  is an entity that cannot be
uniquely identified by its own attributes alone.
An entity set that does not have a primary
key is referred to as a weak entity set. Has no
key attributes. The existence of a weak entity
set depends on the existence of a strong
entity set.
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D Express the number of entities to which another

entity can be associated via a relationship set.
D  

: Each entity in the relationship must
have exactly one related entity.
D  
   

: An entity in the
relationship on one side can have many related
entities but on the other side
D will have maximum of one related entity.
D ! 
: Entities on both the sides can
have many related entities on the other side.
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