One-to-many (data model)

In systems analysis, a one-to-many relationship is a type of cardinality that refers to the relationship between two entities (see also entity–relationship model). For example, take a car and an owner of the car. The car can only be owned by one owner at a time or not owned at all, and an owner could own zero, one, or multiple cars. One owner could have many cars, one-to-many.

In a relational database, a one-to-many relationship exists when one record is related to many records of another table. A one-to-many relationship is not a property of the data, but rather of the relationship itself. One-to-many often refer to a primary key to foreign key relationship between two tables, where the record in the first table can relate to multiple records in the second table. A foreign key is one side of the relationship that shows a row or multiple rows, with one of those rows being the primary key already listed on the first table. This is also called a foreign key constraint, which is important to keep data from being duplicated and have relationships within the database stay reliable as more information is added.

Many-to-many relationships are not able to be used in relational databases and must be converted to one-to-many relationships. Both one-to-many and one-to-one relationships are common in relational databases but are normally created majorly with one-to-many relationships.

The opposite of one-to-many is many-to-one. The transpose of a one-to-many relationship is a many-to-one relationship.

Entity relationship diagram (ERD) notations

One notation as described in Entity Relationship modeling is Chen notation or formally Chen ERD notation created originally by Peter Chen in 1976 where a one-to-many relationship is notated as 1:N where N represents the cardinality and can be 0 or higher. A many-to-one relationship is sometimes notated as N:1.

See also

• One-to-one (data model)
• Many-to-many (data model)