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When do relationships in ERD diagrams get a separate table in a RDBMS


Title is the question. When should a relationship in an ER diagram be given its own table in a RDBMS? For instance, one mail courier(with attributes eid and surname) can deliver a number of packages but a package(attributes,pid, sent_By, going_to) can only have one mail courier. Would it make sense to make a table for the relationship called delivers(with an attribute of the time that the package was delivered)? or should the eid of the mail_courier and time_delivered from the deliver relationship be added to the package entity? Also, what would be an example when you would not want to add the attributes to the package entity?


Solution

  • I think what you are trying is to create a one-to-many relationship between two entities. And for that, there is no need to create a separate table; as you mentioned in your question, just add those two attributes to the package table.

    Where you would need to create a separate table is when you want to achieve many-to-many relationship between two entities. For example, take twitter's followers. One user can have many followers and a follower can follow many users. You can't do that the relational way without creating a new table with just those two columns.