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An entity–relationship model (or ER model) describes interrelated things of interest in a specific domain of knowledge. A basic ER model is composed of entity types (which classify the things of interest) and specifies relationships that can exist between entities (instances of those entity types).
The database schema is the structure of a database described in a formal language supported typically by a relational database management system (RDBMS). The term " schema " refers to the organization of data as a blueprint of how the database is constructed (divided into database tables in the case of relational databases ).
A sample entity–relationship diagram. One of the most common types of conceptual schemas is the ER (entity–relationship model) diagrams. Attributes in ER diagrams are usually modeled as an oval with the name of the attribute, linked to the entity or relationship that contains the attribute.
In systems analysis, a one-to-many relationship is a type of cardinality that refers to the relationship between two entities (see also entity–relationship model). For example, take a car and an owner of the car. The car can only be owned by one owner at a time or not owned at all, and an owner could own zero, one, or multiple cars.
Entity–relationship modeling is a relational schema database modeling method, used in software engineering to produce a type of conceptual data model (or semantic data model) of a system, often a relational database, and its requirements in a top-down fashion.
The terms schema matching and mapping are often used interchangeably for a database process. For this article, we differentiate the two as follows: schema matching is the process of identifying that two objects are semantically related (scope of this article) while mapping refers to the transformations between the objects.
[5] [6] A relational database definition (database schema, sometimes referred to as a relational schema) can thus be thought of as a collection of named relation schemas. [7] [8] In implementations, the domain of each attribute is effectively a data type [9] and a named relation schema is effectively a relation variable (relvar for short).
Most relational databases use the SQL data definition and query language; these systems implement what can be regarded as an engineering approximation to the relational model. A table in a SQL database schema corresponds to a predicate variable; the contents of a table to a relation; key constraints, other constraints, and SQL queries ...