Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 17, numbers 1 and 2, 2024 // View article

Transformation of Entity Relationship Models to Relational Models - A Practical Approach

Authors:
Gregor Grambow
Simon Ruttmann

Keywords: Entity Relationship; ER Model; Relational Model; Database; Editor

Abstract:
Both Entity Relationship (ER) modeling and the relational model have come a long way and are both prevalent. The former for creating conceptual database schemata and the latter for creating technical database schemata. Unfortunately, both of these models are not directly compatible. Over the decades, various theoretic approaches for transforming ER models to relational models have been proposed. These efforts, however, did not yield practical approaches and thus editors capable of such transformations. Modern editors either have no transformation facilities, or do not use the ER model proposed by Peter Chen but rather provide somehow enhanced database diagrams. Therefore, users have to manually transform ER models to relational models, which is cumbersome and error-prone. To tackle this problem, we propose an automatic transformation from ER models to relational ones that focuses on practical applicability and operational semantics. In particular, the approach enables transformations of the original ER model by Chen as well as prevalent extensions. We have proven the applicability of this approach in two ways: First, we have created a graphical editor capable of flexibly modeling ER diagrams and automatically transforming them to relational models. Second, we have conducted a practical study with our approach and the created editor. Our findings show, that the transformation approach works correctly and the implemented editor makes it accessible to users.

Pages: 116 to 128

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2024. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2024

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628