GATE CS 2008 Q83 — ER-model

To represent the ER diagram with the minimum number of tables, we analyze the relationships and their cardinalities:

• The relationship $R1$ between $M$ and $P$ is many-to-one from $M$ to $P$. This means each entity in $M$ is associated with at most one entity in $P$.
• Because $M$ is on the "many" side, we can merge the relationship $R1$ into the table for $M$ to minimize the total number of tables.
• The merged table for $M$ and $R1$ will contain all attributes of $M$ along with the primary key of $P$ as a foreign key.

Thus, the attributes for this merged table are:

This matches the attribute set given in Option A.