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For example, a particular song is an entity, the collection of all songs in a database is an entity set, the eaten relationship between a child and his lunch is a single relationship, and the set of all such child-lunch relationships in a database is a relationship set.
The foreign key is typically a primary key of an entity it is related to. The foreign key is an attribute of the identifying (or owner, parent, or dominant) entity set. Each element in the weak entity set must have a relationship with exactly one element in the owner entity set, [1] and therefore, the relationship cannot be a many-to-many ...
Thus, the "relation" in "relational database" refers to the various tables in the database; a relation is a set of tuples. The columns enumerate the various attributes of the entity (the employee's name, address or phone number, for example), and a row is an actual instance of the entity (a specific employee) that is represented by the relation.
In this example, the three lines next to the song entity indicate that an artist can have many songs. The two vertical lines next to the artist entity indicate songs can only have one performer. In the real world, data modeling is critical because as the data grows voluminous, tables linked by keys must be used to speed up programmed retrieval ...
An associative entity is a term used in relational and entity–relationship theory. A relational database requires the implementation of a base relation (or base table) to resolve many-to-many relationships. A base relation representing this kind of entity is called, informally, an associative table. An associative entity (using Chen notation)
Formally, a "database" refers to a set of related data accessed through the use of a "database management system" (DBMS), which is an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database (although restrictions may exist that limit access to particular data).
The database schema is the structure of a database described in a formal language supported typically by a relational database management system (RDBMS). The term " schema " refers to the organization of data as a blueprint of how the database is constructed (divided into database tables in the case of relational databases ).
Database normalization is the process of structuring a relational database accordance with a series of so-called normal forms in order to reduce data redundancy and improve data integrity. It was first proposed by British computer scientist Edgar F. Codd as part of his relational model .