I need to create a er diagram which is a entity relationship diagram about a hospital. My professor gave us a case study and the data requirements are wards, staff, patients, patient's next-of-kin, local doctors, patient appointment, out-patients, in-patients, patient medication, surgical and non surgical supplies, pharmaceutical supplies, ward requisitions, and suppliers. I don't know how to design it or even where to start. can someone please help me???
Have you spoken to your professor or someone else in the class about this?
It's difficult to help you without knowing exactly what you know about database design. You mention that you don't know "how to do the relationships". There are many steps involved in knowing "how to do the relationships".
Are you familiar with the different types of relationships: 1 to 1, 1 to many, many to many
If you don't know what the relationships are, then that's where you need to start.
If you know what they are, then you need to determine how the tables are related to each other with those relationships. The first step of this is deciding which tables are related to each other (don't worry about the type of relationship). Then go back and determine what type of relationship each relationship should be. After a while, you will be able to do these steps at the same time, but just take it one step at a time for now.
First off, it looks to me like your data requirements are not all entities. Looking at your list it seems like you should have an entity supplies with attributes of surgical, non-surgical, pharmaceutical, etc.
Same with patient, attributes in, out, next of kin, and so on.
Once you figure these out you need to look at how they relate to each other.
i.e.--A doctor sees many patients.
However, I see a lot of many to many relationships in there and you'll have to fix those with another entity.
I'm just starting out with db design too so I can help you out with the simplified stuff.
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