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For example, consider a database of electronic health records. Such a database could contain tables like the following: A doctor table with information about physicians. A patient table for medical subjects undergoing treatment. An appointment table with an entry for each hospital visit. Natural relationships exist between these entities:
An associative (or junction) table maps two or more tables together by referencing the primary keys (PK) of each data table. In effect, it contains a number of foreign keys (FK), each in a many-to-one relationship from the junction table to the individual data tables. The PK of the associative table is typically composed of the FK columns ...
An example of a data table column with low-cardinality would be a CUSTOMER table with a column named NEW_CUSTOMER. This column would contain only two distinct values: Y or N, denoting whether the customer was new or not. Since there are only two possible values held in this column, its cardinality type would be referred to as low-cardinality. [2]
For example, think of A as Authors, and B as Books. An Author can write several Books, and a Book can be written by several Authors. In a relational database management system, such relationships are usually implemented by means of an associative table (also known as join table, junction table or cross-reference table), say, AB with two one-to-many relationships A → AB and B → AB.
A table in a SQL database schema corresponds to a predicate variable; the contents of a table to a relation; key constraints, other constraints, and SQL queries correspond to predicates. However, SQL databases deviate from the relational model in many details, and Codd fiercely argued against deviations that compromise the original principles. [3]
The relational algebra uses set union, set difference, and Cartesian product from set theory, and adds additional constraints to these operators to create new ones.. For set union and set difference, the two relations involved must be union-compatible—that is, the two relations must have the same set of attributes.
A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table, linking these two tables. In the context of relational databases, a foreign key is subject to an inclusion dependency constraint that the tuples consisting of the foreign key attributes in one relation, R, must also exist in some other (not necessarily distinct) relation, S; furthermore that those ...
A relational database contains multiple tables, each similar to the one in the "flat" database model. One of the strengths of the relational model is that, in principle, any value occurring in two different records (belonging to the same table or to different tables), implies a relationship among those two records.