Question

Consider the following set of requirements for a UNIVERSITY database that is used to keep track of students' transcripts.

(a) The university keeps track of each student's name, student number, social security number, current address and phone, permanent address and phone, birthdate, sex, class (freshman, sophomore, ..., graduate), major department, minor department (if any), and degree program (B.A., B.S., ..., Ph.D.). Some user applications need to refer to the city, state, and zip of the student's permanent address, and to the student's last name. Both social security number and student number have unique values for each student.

(b) Each department is described by a name, department code, office number, office phone, and college. Both name and code have unique values for each department. Each department has a faculty as a Chair to manage it.

(c) Each course has a course name, description, course number, number of semester hours, level, and offering department. The value of course number is unique for each course.

(d) Each section has an instructor, semester, year, course, and section number. The section number distinguishes different sections of the same course that are taught during the same semester/year; its values are 1, 2, 3, ..., up to the number of sections taught during each semester.

(e) A grade report has a student, section, letter grade, and numeric grade (0, 1, 2, 3,

4 for F, D, C, B, A, respectively).

(f) The database keeps track of each faculty’s name, faculty ID, SSN, address, email and office location.

(g) Each course section will have a faculty assigned as instructor.

(h) Each College controls several departments. Each College is described by a name, college ID and college office location. A faculty assigned as a Dean to manage a college.

Draw an ER diagram based on the requirement described here.

You should draw entity types, attributes and relationships in the ER diagram [10 points].

Specify key attributes of each entity type [2 points].

Use hierarchy structure to represent composite attributes. Use double lined oval to represent multi-value attributes [2 points].

Answer 1

Below is the ER diagram of the given scenario. It consist of 5 entities connected via 4 relationship. Each entity has certain set of attribute and primary key is mention as underlined attribute.

Attribute permanent address of entity Student is shown as composite attribute consisting of city, state, zip. It is shown in hierarchy structure.

Attribute College of entity department is shown as multivalue attribute as a department can have multiple colleges under it.

Cardinality in the ERD is shown in crow's foot notation.