INFS 6930 Assignment #1 ERD

INFS 6930 Specification Document

I. Introduction: The purpose of this specification document is to show the relationships

present within Continental Palms DVD.

II. Business Rules:

1. One Branch has many staff, one staff can only work at one branch.
2. One customer must register, and one customer can only register at one branch.
3. One customer may rent 0 or many DVD’s.
4. One DVD Copy is rented 0 or many times.
5. One branch has many DVD copies.
6. One DVD has many roles for the actor/directors on the DVD.
7. One Actor or Director has many roles on many DVD’s.
8. Many original DVD’s are copied to make DVD copies.
9. Rentals are recorded in the Rent history 0 or many times.

III. Additional Constraints:

1. The Staff entity is split into the subtype manager entity, showing how the staff table can
be split into the manager category.

2. There is a recursive relationship between staff and supervisor, one supervisor is given up
to 10 supervisees. One staff member may be the supervisor of the supervisor of another
staff member. The manager does not have a supervisor and is a resulting subtype from
this relationship. The cardinality of this relationship being (1,10).

3. DVD original is split into the two subtypes of “Child” and “Foreign” to represent the
different types of DVD’s present within this database.

4. A historical record of the total number of times a DVD copy is rented is kept in the Rent
History table. It can be recorded zero or many times.
5. The “Registers”, “Rent”, and “Role” entities act as bridging entities in this database. The
Registers bridge entity shows how customers must register at a local branch prior to
renting DVD’s. The Rent bridge entity shows how the customer must go through the
action of renting a DVD before he/she can take a DVD home. And the role bridging
entity shows how each actor/director on a DVD has a role and may have many roles on
many DVD’s.

6. This database system contains a measurement of the condition of the DVD copies to be
rented. The scale is 1 to 4, and when the copy is a 4 on the scale the DVD is considered
broken, and unable to rent.

7. Each customer may only rent up to 10 DVD’s, upon reaching this maximum amount they
may no longer rent anymore DVD copies until they return the copies they currently have
out.

8. The Manager, and Staff entities were given primary keys because they lacked a primary
key as per the assignment instructions.

9. Actors and Directors have many roles and may be found on many DVD’s. This means
that each actor and director may have a different role on several different DVD’s. But for
each DVD an actor/director has only one role. For example, a Foreign DVD may have a
lead actor who is credited on a Child DVD as a supporting actor.

10. A branch has zero or many DVD copies, this is because every branch would not feasibly
have a copy of every original copy. A branches DVD copy stock would likely vary
branch to branch, especially considering the differences in taste in DVD’s by different
customers. DVD copies would likely be distributed as needed by the branches.

11. One customer can rent 0 or many DVD’s and DVD copies are rented 0 or many times.
This means that a DVD copy could go unrented for a significant amount of time at a
specific branch. A customer on the other hand could register, and never rent a DVD copy.