MEER—An EER model enhanced with structure methods

Abstract

Entity relationship (ER) schemas include cardinality constraints, that restrict the dependencies among entities within a relationship type. The cardinality constraints have direct impact on the application maintenance, since insertions or deletions of entities or relationships might affect related entities. Indeed, maintenance of a system or of a database can be strengthened to enforce consistency with respect to the cardinality constraints in a schema. Yet, once an ER schema is translated into a logical database schema, or translated within a system, the direct correlation between the cardinality constraints and maintenance transactions is lost, since the components of the ER schema might be decomposed among those of the logical database schema or the target system. In this paper, a full solution to the enforcement of cardinality constraints in EER schemas is given. We extend the enhanced ER (EER) data model with structure-based update methods that are fully defined by the cardinality constraints. The structure methods are provably terminating and cardinality faithful, i.e., they do not insert new inconsistencies and can only decrease existing ones. A refined approach towards measuring the cardinality consistency of a database is introduced. The contribution of this paper is in the automatic creation of update methods, and in building the formal basis for proving their correctness.