relationships between database tables
vincekool
Posted by vincekool
Last Updated: March 12, 2012

A hefty part of designing a relational database is dividing the data elements into related tables. Once you're ready to start working with the data, you rely on relationships between the tables to pull the data together in meaningful ways. For instance, order information is useless unless you know which customer placed a particular order. By now, you probably realize that you don't store customer and order information in the same table. Instead, you store order and customer data in two related tables and then use a relationship between the two tables to view each order and its corresponding customer information at the same time. If normalized tables are a relational database's foundation, then relationships are the cornerstone.


Relationship types
You share many relationships with members of your family. For instance, you and your mother are related. You have only one mother, but she may have several children. You and your siblings are related—you may have many brothers and sisters and, of course, they'll have many brothers and sisters as well. If you're married, both you and your spouse have a spouse—each other—but only one at a time. Database relationships are very similar in that they're associations between tables. There are three types of relationships:
  • One-to-one: Both tables can have only one record on either side of the relationship. Each primary key value relates to only one (or no) record in the related table. They're like spouses—you may or may not be married, but if you are, both you and your spouse have only one spouse. Most one-to-one relationships are forced by business rules and don't flow naturally from the data. In the absence of such a rule, you can usually combine both tables into one table without breaking any normalization rules.
  • One-to-many: The primary key table contains only one record that relates to none, one, or many records in the related table. This relationship is similar to the one between you and a parent. You have only one mother, but your mother may have several children.
  • Many-to-many: Each record in both tables can relate to any number of records (or no records) in the other table. For instance, if you have several siblings, so do your siblings (have many siblings). Many-to-many relationships require a third table, known as an associate or linking table, because relational systems can't directly accommodate the relationship.

Establishing relationships
By the time you get around to establishing relationships between the related tables, you'll probably be very familiar with the data. Consequently, associations are more obvious at this point than when you started. Your database system relies on matching values found in both tables to form relationships. When a match is found, the system pulls the data from both tables to create a virtual record. For instance, you might want to see all the books written by a particular author. In this case, the system would match values between the Books and the Authors tables. It's important to remember that most of the time, the resulting record is dynamic, which means any change made to the virtual record will usually work its way back to the underlying table.

Those matching values are the primary and foreign key values. (The relational model doesn't require that a relationship be based on a primary key. You can use any candidate key in the table, but using the primary key is the accepted standard.) You learned about primary keys in Part 2—a primary key uniquely identifies each record in a table. A foreign key is, simply put, one table's primary key in another table. As such, there's not much for you to do—simply add the primary key field to the related table, as a foreign key.

The only consideration is that a foreign key field must be of the same data type as the primary key. Some systems allow one exception to this rule and will allow a relationship between a number and an autonumbering field (such as AutoNumber in Access of Identity in SQL Server). In addition, foreign key values can be Null, although the recommendation is that you not leave a foreign key Null without a very specific reason to do so. Chances are you may never work with a database that requires this capability.
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