Analysis of cardinality constraints in redundant relationships

Abstract

A complete analysis of redundant relationships in the entity-relationship (ER) model is presented. It looks at the maximum cardinality constraints to develop a set of general rules to identify groups of trivial and ambiguous structures and then give greater consideration to the minimum cardinality constraints in those groups that require detailed investigations. A thorough pattern analysis of redundant relationships is provided from both a structural and semantic view. A complete set of heuristics for identifying redundant relationships that can be easily applied by data modelers and system analysis people.