• Relationships and the RDM Part 1: Kinds of Relationships
• Relationships and the RDM Part 2: Integrity Constraints

• Relationships within groups:

- among properties and entities;
- among properties.

among entity members:

- uniqueness;
- aggregate;
- among group and subgroup members (ESS).

• Relationships across-groups:

- many-to-many (M:N);
- many-to-one (M:1);
- one-to-one (1:1).

“William Kent confesses (in my words) that he can not distinguish between "relationships" and "attributes" ... the later might be completely redundant ... the notion of an attribute presumes a relationship, so we must define that first ... All of this is handled explicitly and correctly in ORM -- we model objects (each one appears only once in a data model diagram) and relationships. There are no attributes ... an attribute is an object playing a role in a relationship with another object.”

“... we are not modeling objects/entities/attribute ... at all in the relational model, [but] a bunch of relationships ... hence perhaps Codd was correct in calling it a "relation", a bunch of relationships ... Interesting that most people think of relationships as being the distinguishing characteristic of a relational model and it is not ... [it] has no relationships since Codd decreed that all relationships must be represented by foreign keys, which are exactly the same as "attributes ...”

“... isn't it funny, that the term relation is implicitly mapped (in our minds) to a table of a database? If (loosely speaking) a relationship in our conventional data modeling is represented by a foreign key in a table (and combining both points together) -- should a table (relation) consists only of foreign keys? ... What [other] type(s) of relationships can be explicitly and formally defined in a relational data model? Of course there are many other relationships which can be inferred, such as between an attribute and an entity identifier. Please give me a precise reference to where Codd spoke of relationships [differently than i]n his 1985 piece published in ComputerWorld, [where] he said that the only way to represent a relationship (between relations) was through explicitly stored values (i.e., attributes, foreign keys).”

“In my personal understanding, a relation is defined as a set of tuples. Then ... "in the relational model every relation represents a relationship". And then a quote from Chen: "each tuple of entities ... is a relationship". If I use the first and the second statements - I can say that a relationship is a set of tuples. The third statement says that a relationship is a tuple. So far, is a relationship a set of an element of a set? (Or may be a set of sets?).”

“I argue that there is essentially no difference between relationships between entities of distinct classes and between properties of the same class. They both represent relationships. A property can represent a relationship between entities of distinct classes. If such relationships are represented by foreign keys and the relations representing the classes must be in 1NF, then relational databases can represent only M:1 relationships, a very unnecessary limitation when modeling some reality of interest.”

“The entity-relationship model is essentially a directed graph model, where relationships are prominent residents. Not so in the relational model (despite the name), where relationships (between relations, mind you) are not visible and in the SQL implementations is reduced to constraints. Relationships are about structure, which is as important as meaning (the semantics of the terms used in the universe being modeled).”