Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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.
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.
The same class (table) can appear several times on the same diagram. Use the following standard symbols to indicate the type of the relationship. One-to-one: a simple line. One-to-many, two-way: a line with a "paw". One-to-many, one-way: an arrow. Many-to-many: a line with two "paws". Do not lump together inheritance and data relationships. [1]
[5] [6] A relational database definition (database schema, sometimes referred to as a relational schema) can thus be thought of as a collection of named relation schemas. [7] [8] In implementations, the domain of each attribute is effectively a data type [9] and a named relation schema is effectively a relation variable (relvar for short).
In database theory, a conjunctive query is a restricted form of first-order queries using the logical conjunction operator. Many first-order queries can be written as conjunctive queries. In particular, a large part of queries issued on relational databases can be expressed in this way.
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 ...