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Many-to-Many Relationship Model
In a "product sales" database, a customer's order may contain one or more products; and a product can appear in many orders. In a "bookstore" database, a book is written by one or more authors; while an author may write zero or more books. This kind of relationship is known as many-to-many.
Let's illustrate with a "product sales" database. We begin with two tables: Products and Orders. The table products contain information about the products (such as name, description and quantityInStock) with productID as its primary key. The table orders contain customer's orders (customerID, dateOrdered, dateRequired and status). Again, we cannot store the items ordered inside the Orders table, as we do not know how many columns to reserve for the items. We also cannot store the order information in the Products table.
To support many-to-many relationship, we need to create a third table (known as a junction table), say OrderDetails (or OrderLines), where each row represents an item of a particular order. For the OrderDetails table, the primary key consists of two columns: orderID and productID, that uniquely identify each row. The columns orderID and productID in OrderDetails table are used to reference Orders and Products tables, hence, they are also the foreign keys in the OrderDetails table.
The many-to-many relationship is, in fact, implemented as two one-to-many relationships, with the introduction of the junction table.
An order has many items in OrderDetails. An OrderDetails item belongs to one particular order.
A product may appear in many OrderDetails. Each OrderDetails item specified one product.
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