Category archives: MySQL

ER-Diagram Symbols

Above you see the atomic building blocks of the ER-Diagram:

  • Entity
  • Attribute
  • Relation
  • Carninalities (Crow’s feet notation) one, zero-or-one, zero-or-many, one-or-many, many.

From Requrements to Deployment

Model inspired by Jukić et al.

ER-Diagram

This ER-Diagram is inspired by some of the tables in his sample database

 

Database Implementation

Here are Ben Forta’s tables in PhpMyAdmin “design viewW.

During implementation you will create the tables and structure.

Note that you have to design the data as integers, numbers, etc.:

  • cust_id = int(11)
  • cust_name = char(50)

The customers table in ER-diagram form.

Normalizing

 

In the diagram the cardinalities have to be normalized. Here are a few solutions to typical problems.

 

TIP: From ER-diagram to HTML form

Look at the attributes. Create an input for each field. Then use the INSERT keyword.

Adminer – a lightweight alternative to PhpMyAdmin

PhpMyAdmin is powerfull but the GUI is messy. Adminer is a lightweight alternative. You have to download the files and place them in your folder.


# sudo apt-get isntall adminer
# sudo ln -s /usr/share/adminer/ adminer

The first line will install the files. They are saved in /usr/share/adminer. Therefore we need a symbolic link to the folder, which is made in the second line of code.

SQL count(): The Most Popular Cake

So how do yo find the most popular cake in the Shire Bakery? Here’s an idea.

PhpMyAdmin: the most popular caske
PhpMyAdmin: the most popular caske
-- Show the best cookie
-- See: Ben Forta Chap. 16
SELECT COUNT( cakes.cake ) AS 'popular', cakes.cake, costumers.who
FROM cakes, costumers, likes
-- sort out the cardinalities (relations)
WHERE cakes.cakes_id = likes.cakes_id
AND costumers.costumers_id = likes.costumers_id

-- group by the cake 
group by cakes.cake

-- and sort (most popular and downwards)
order by popular desc

SQL: Many-to-Many and One-to-Many

Here’s a short tutorial on how to solve some basic SQL cardinalities. First have a look at the ER-diagram for the database and the resulting tables in PhpMyAdmin.

Many to many and one to many
Many to many and one to many
The ER-Diagram transformed to tables in PhpMyAdmin
The ER-Diagram transformed to tables in PhpMyAdmin

Many-to-Many

Many to many cardinalities may be solved like this:


SELECT cake, who
FROM cakes, costumers, likes
WHERE costumers.costumers_id = likes.costumers_id
AND cakes.cakes_id = likes.cakes_id

Note that there are two where clauses combined via AND.

One-to-Many

This cardinality is more easy:


SELECT inventory .* , costumers.who
FROM inventory, costumers
WHERE inventory.costumers_id = costumers.costumers_id

In the “many” table you simply connect via the “one” table’s id.

You can download and try out the samples from my Github Repository oneToMany_ManyToMany.

Read On

These samples are inspired by Ben Forta’s “MySQL Crash Course” Ch. 15 – 16.