Associative entity

In data models, an associative entity is an element of the Entity-relationship model.

Description

The relational model does not offer direct support to many-to-many relationships, even though such relationships happen frequently in normal usage.

The solution to this problem is the creation of another table to hold the necessary information for this relationship.

This new table is called an associative entity.

See also

• Data model
• Database relational model
• Entity-relationship model
• Many-to-many relationships
• Relational model

External links

• Associative entity @ Wikipedia