ER diagram - avoiding one-to-one relationship

Question

I've been working on an ER diagram for university project. It is about transport company. That company does particular jobs for other companies and for each job, there are three types of documents needed, and those documents have unique identifiers among other documents of the same kind. So what I did is made these types of documents as separate entities. Now when I want to join them(call them Doc1, Doc2, Doc3) into one entity(call it Job), they are basically made only for that one job and for no other. Also, this job has only one of each of these documents, so therefore it looks like relationships between documents and job are one-to-one. However, when the professor was teaching us ER models, he told that we should always avoid drawing one-to-one relationships(that there should be a way to make these documents kind of attributes of job). So what I want to know is - is it correct to draw the identifiers of these documents as attributes of job, and then make them as foreign keys referencing corresponding fields in documents' table(in relations model)? Or is there any other, more elegant way to connect them somehow avoiding these one-to-one relationships? Also, if I do it this way, I guess I should make all 3 columns representing documents' identifiers UNIQUE in Job table, right? So that I avoid making two jobs having, for example, same Doc1? Thank you!

Answer 1

One-to-one relationships are to be avoided, because they signal that the entities joined by the relationship are actually one. However, in the case specified here, the relationship is not one-to-one. Instead it is "one to zero or one", also known as "one-to-one optional".

An example is the relationship between a Home and a Lot. The Home must be located on a Lot, and only one Home can be located on any given Lot, but the Lot can exist before the Home is built. If you are modelling this relationship, you would have a "one to zero or one" relationship between Lot and Home. It would be shown like this:

In your case you have three separate dependencies, so it would look like:

Physically, these relationships may be represented in two ways:

1. A nullable foreign key in the "one" row (Lot, in my example above), or
2. A non-nullable foreign key in the "zero or one" row (Home, in my example above)

You can choose the approach that is most comfortable and efficient for you, depending on the direction in which your application usually navigates.

You may decide to have the database enforce the uniqueness constraint (the fact that only one Home can be on a Lot). In some databases, a null value participates in uniqueness constraints (in other words, a unique index can only have one Null entry). In such a database, you would be constrained to the second approach. In MySQL, this is not the case; a uniqueness constraint ignores null values, so you can choose either approach. The second approach is more common.