An Experimental Research on the Design Characteristics and Performance of the Entity-Relationship Model

개체관계 모형의 설계 특성과 성과에 관한 실험적 연구

This paper makes an attempt to find a systematic portion of the database design process, especially using the Entity-Relationship(E-R) model. Basically, we consider three aspects as a systematic portion of the database design process. They are, the strategy that a designer selects to design an E-R diagram, designer's cognitive style, and the knowledge and preference of the database designer. An experiment has been carried out in order to verify the systematic relationship between above-mentioned three aspects and the E-R modeling performance. The target system is a professional baseball system. A normative E-R diagram was constructed based upon 48 E-R diagrams produced during the experiment. The ANOVA process has been used to analyze the results. It has been found that there exist significant differences in query-answering capacity and the completeness of the E-R model among design methods. Individual differences in cognitive styles has not been found to be significantly related to the modeling performance.