Generalization in DBMS

Design steps for Generalization

• Define some entities with attributes.
• Identify common attributes between these entities and create a super-entity, so that all the remaining entities in some way related to the super-entity.
• Add Relationship between entities.

Examples for Generalization

• For example, we have entities as a teacher, workers, students, households…so on.
• These entities have some most common requirements name, salary, role, etc role of these categories can be generalized as a super common entity as citizens.

Conclusion:

• Generalization is a bottom-up design approach.
• Common properties from sub-entities are generalized to a super-entity.
• generalization is always applied to a group of entities and if over-designed it seems to reduce the schema size.