Entity vs. Attribute
Should address be an attribute of Employees or an entity (connected to Employees by a relationship)?
Depends upon the use we want to make of address information, and the semantics of the data:
- If we have several addresses per employee, address must be an entity (since attributes cannot be set-valued).
- If the structure (city, street, etc.) is important, e.g., we want to retrieve employees in a given city, address must be modeled as an entity (since attribute values are atomic).