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It occurs when a (master) table links to multiple tables in a one-to-many relationship. The issue derives its name from the visual appearance of the model when it is drawn in an entity–relationship diagram, as the linked tables 'fan out' from the master table. This type of model resembles a star schema, which is a common design in data ...
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)
A sample entity–relationship diagram One of the most common types of conceptual schemas is the ER ( entity–relationship model ) diagrams. Attributes in ER diagrams are usually modeled as an oval with the name of the attribute, linked to the entity or relationship that contains the attribute.
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:
For this example it is assumed that each book has only one author. A table that conforms to the relational model has a primary key which uniquely identifies a row. In our example, the primary key is a composite key of {Title, Format} (indicated by the underlining):
An entity–relationship model (ERM) is an abstract conceptual representation of structured data. Entity–relationship modeling is a relational schema database modeling method, used in software engineering to produce a type of conceptual data model (or semantic data model ) of a system, often a relational database , and its requirements in a ...
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.
Barker's notation refers to the ERD notation developed by Richard Barker, Ian Palmer, Harry Ellis et al. whilst working at the British consulting firm CACI around 1981. The notation was adopted by Barker when he joined Oracle and is effectively defined in his book Entity Relationship Modelling as part of the CASE Method series of books.