Unprofessional term for relationship

Question

There are a couple of questions around requesting a difference / explanation for identifying and not identifying relationships in a relationship database.

My question is: can you come up with a simpler term for these jargons? I understand that technical terms must be specific and unambiguous. But having an "alternate name" can help students talk more about the concept.

In fact, we want to use a simpler term in our own database modeling tool so that first users without much experience in computer science can learn faster.

Hooray!

Answer 1

I often see a child table or a dependent table used as a due date. You can use any of these terms for a table with an identifying relationship.

Then say that the link table is a table with non-identifying relationships.

For example, PhoneNumbers is a child of Users , because the phone number has an identifying relationship with its user (i.e., the primary key of PhoneNumbers includes the foreign key for the primary key of Users ).

While the Users table has a state column, which is the foreign key of the States table, which makes it non-identifiable. That way, you can tell Users States link, but you are not a descendant of it.

Answer 2

I think that belongs will be a good name for an identifying relationship.

A “weak entity type” does not have its own key, but only a “partial key”, therefore, each instance of an object of this weak entity type must belong to another instance of the object so that it can be identified, and this is a “definition of relations”. For example, a landlord may have a database with apartments and rooms . A room can be called a kitchen or a bathroom , and although this name is unique in the apartment, there will be many rooms with the name kitchen in the database, so this is just a partial key. To uniquely identify a room in the database, you need to say that this is the kitchen in this particular apartment. In other words, rooms refer to apartments.

Answer 3

I will recommend the term “weak object” from ER modeling.

Some modelers conceptualize an object consisting of entities and relationships among objects. This leads to the modeling of essential relations (ER Modeling). An attribute can be bound to an entity or relationship, and the values ​​stored in the database are instances of the attributes.

If you are doing an ER simulation, there is a kind of object called a “weak object”. Part of the identity of a weak entity is the identity of a stronger entity to which the weak belongs.

An example is an order in an order processing system. Orders consist of line items, and each line item contains a product identifier, unit price, and quantity. But line items do not have an identification number for all orders. Instead, a position is indicated by {position number, order number}. In other words, a position cannot exist if it is not part of the same order. Item number 1 is the first item in the order in which it belongs, but you need both numbers to identify the item.

Easily turn an ER model into a relational model. It’s also easy for people who are experts in data, but don’t know anything about databases to get used to the ER-model of the data that they understand.

There are other modelers who strongly object to the need for ER modeling. I am not one of them.

Answer 4

Nothing, absolutely nothing in the simulation, where you can find such things as “relationships” (ER, I suppose), “technical”, “exact” or “unambiguous”. And it cannot be.

A) ER modeling is always and necessarily unofficial, as it can never be enough to capture / express the entire database definition.

B) There are so many different ER dialogs that it is simply not possible for all of them to use exactly the same terms with exactly the same meaning. Recently, I even found that some British university that studies ER modeling uses the term “entity subtype” for the same thing that I always called an entity supertype, and vice versa!

Answer 5

You can use connection .

You have a join between two tables where the identifiers are the same.

This type of thing.

Answer 6

What about

• Association
• Link
• Correlation