Preparation In This Assignment: Drawing An Entity

Preparationin This Assignment You Will Be Drawing An Entity Relations

In this assignment, you will be drawing an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) or Database Design Diagram for a college's student and course tracking system. The diagram should include entities such as students, courses, and instructors, along with their attributes. You are to create appropriate relationships between these entities, reflecting the college's data management needs. Use any drawing tool like Visio, Word, PowerPoint, or hand-draw the diagram, then capture images or screenshots and insert them into a Word document for submission. Include a description of each entity's attributes, the relationships, and any assumptions made about the business rules in designing the diagram.

Paper For Above instruction

Creating an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) for a college database involves capturing the essential entities, their attributes, and the relationships among them. This process demands a clear understanding of the college’s information system requirements, such as tracking students' course enrollments, course details, and instructor assignments. In this paper, I will outline the design of such a database, describe the entities and attributes, define their relationships, and discuss the assumptions made during model development.

Entities and Attributes

The primary entities identified for this college database include Student, Course, Instructor, and Enrollment. Each entity possesses a set of attributes that uniquely identify its instances and store relevant information.

Student: StudentID (Primary Key), FirstName, LastName, DateOfBirth, Major, Email, PhoneNumber.

Course: CourseID (Primary Key), CourseName, CourseDescription, Credits, Department.

Instructor: InstructorID (Primary Key), FirstName, LastName, Department, Email, PhoneNumber.

Enrollment: EnrollmentID (Primary Key), StudentID (Foreign Key), CourseID (Foreign Key), EnrollmentDate, FinalGrade.

Relationships and Business Rules

The key relationships among these entities include:

• Student–Enrollment: A student can enroll in many courses, but each enrollment record links one student to a specific course. This is a one-to-many relationship from Student to Enrollment.
• Course–Enrollment: A course can have many students enrolled, with each enrollment record representing a single student's enrollment in a course. This is a one-to-many relationship from Course to Enrollment.
• Instructor–Course: An instructor teaches one or more courses, but each course is typically assigned to a single instructor (assuming single instructor per course for simplicity). This is a one-to-many relationship from Instructor to Course.

To accommodate this, the Course entity includes a foreign key InstructorID, linking each course to the instructor teaching it.

Assumptions and Business Rules

• Each course is assigned to only one instructor, simplifying the instructor-course relationship.
• Students can enroll in multiple courses, and courses can have multiple students.
• Enrollment records track individual student-course combinations, including enrollment date and final grade.
• The system assumes that student information like contact details and majors change infrequently, so the attributes are static unless updated.
• The database design does not account for prerequisites or course scheduling complexities to maintain simplicity.
• Each entity's primary key uniquely identifies its records; foreign keys establish relationships.

Conclusion

Designing this ERD provides a clear blueprint for implementing a college database that efficiently tracks students, courses, instructors, and enrollments. The relationships reflect the business rules, ensuring data integrity and support for typical college operations. This ERD can serve as a foundation for creating physical database schemas in relational database systems such as MySQL, SQL Server, or Oracle.

References

• Costa, C. (2020). Fundamentals of Database Systems. Pearson.