Entity Relationship Diagram

Doctoral Tracking Database – Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)
The ERD was designed in Visio (Microsoft) keeping in view the data presentation requirements from the reports. Crow’s Foot notation was used for modeling the data (Dybka). Based on the proposed ERD, the enrollment, course completion, course sequence, advisor and thesis committee reports can easily be generated at any time.
Entities
Four entities extracted from the data presented in the reports include student, course, professor and thesis committee.
Relationships and Cardinalities
The relationships between the entities were based on the following business rules:
Many students enroll to many courses (mandatory, many-to-many)
Many courses have many students (mandatory, many-to-many)’
A course may have a prerequisite course (optional, one-to-one)
A course may be a prerequisite to many courses (optional, one-to-many)
A student may have a thesis committee (optional, one-to-one)
Many committees have many professors (mandatory, many-to-many)
A committee has a chair (mandatory, one-one)
A professor may be part of many committees (optional, one-to-many)
A student has an advisor (mandatory, one-to-one)
An advisor may advise many students (optional, one-to-many)
The many-to-many relationships between entities were resolved by introducing relationship entities containing foreign keys from the related entities.
Third Normal Form
For the ERD to be in its 3NF, its attributes must be atomic, no repeating groups should be present, and there should be no partial or transitive dependencies between the attributes within the entities.

The proposed ERD conforms to all the requirements of 2NF.

Figure SEQ Figure * ARABIC 1 ERD
Works Cited
Dybka, Patrycja. “ERD Notations in Data Modeling. Part 6 – Crow’s Foot Notation”. Vertabelo. (2016). 10th November 2016 < http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/technical-articles/crow-s-foot-notation >
Microsoft Support. “Create a Database Model (also known as Entity Relationship Diagram)”. Microsoft. (2016). 10th November 2016 < https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-Database-Model-also-known-as-Entity-Relationship-diagram-717b82fc-de58-416e-ac10-80a3ba9f8cf7 >