Entity Relationship diagrams

A car rental company has several car rental agencies across the country. The agencies rent several classes of vehicles:compact, midsize, full size, sport utility. Each vehicle is managed by one agency. Customers rent vehicles from the different agencies. When a vehicle is rented, a new rental record is added to the Rental table with dateout as the current date and dateReturned is left null. When a vehicle is returned the record is updated by filling in the DateReturned field. A portion of the car rental table is given below.

Vehicle(VehicleId, VehicleClassId, AgencyId)
Rental( RentalId, VehicleId, CustomerId, DateOut , DateReturned)
Customer( CustomerId, CustomerName, CustomerBalance)
Agency( AgencyId, AgencyLocation)
vehicleClass(VehicleClassId, VehicleClass, RentalRate)


help needed in creating an entity relationship diagram

You are almost there. You just need to draw diagram and link different entities by the lines depicting cardinality.

I have done by diagram, but not comfortable it is correct. Here are my relations, am I on the correct path?

Vehicle 1 1 1 * Rental
Vehicle 1 1 1 1 Agency
Vehicle 1 1 1 1 VehicleClass
Customer 1 1 1 * Rental

Above is how I look at the Cardinality. Is there any way I can check, any tecnique I can apply to know for sure that my answer is correct.

I don't understand 1 notations.

You can have 1-to-many, 1-to-1 or many-to-many relations. Best way to identify them is looking at the data you might have. For example, one vehicle may be rented many times, so vehical has 1-to-many relation to rental (assuming one rental does not have many vehicles).

Also you need to figure out whether the relation is identifying or non-identifying, meaning whether every tuple in target entity must have a correponding source tuple.

what i mean is
Vehicle 1 to 1 (min and max cardinalities) 1 -* Rental

Dear Chetah,

Let's see now. We assume that

1 - One Agency can have Many Customers but One Customer has to belong to only to One Agency - Relationship No. 1 (1-to-many)

2 - One Customer can have Many Rentals but One Rental has to belong to only one Customer - Relationship No. 2 - (1-to-many)

3 - One Rental can have Many Vehicles but One Vehicle has to belong to only One Rental at One Time since you can not rent one vehicle at the same time - Relationship No. 3 - (1-to-many)

4 - One Vehicle Class can have many Vehicles but one Vehicle has to have only One Vehicle Class - Relatioship No. 4 - (1-to-many)

And so we have:

Attachment 502

I have come across the problem and can not understand why rental has to be connected to Agency while it is already connected to Agency through the Customer (As I have Done Above). If we connect Rental to Agency Than we also have to connect The Rental to Customer. So we will have two relationships as below.

Attachment 503


Which is right? Anu Body.

Regards

Jawad

Sorry there is a mistake in the ERD. Just remove the Vehicle ID Column from the Rentals Table in both the images. It was a problem with the CASE tool (Microsoft Visio) I was using. Everything else seems fine. I hope so. But If some body can explain the difference between the Model 1 and Mode 2 with 2 relationships Please

Regards

Jawad

chetah, I'm sure you've figured it out already and i might be a bit too late in replying but it's important for you to know that for a relationship database to work you need to create one-to-many relationships throughout your database.

All one-to-one relationships must be combined and all many-to-many relationships need to be broken down.

Good Luck, Rushy