What Does Relational Mean?
This term relational doesn’t refer to relationships between tables. It refers to the table itself, or rather, the relationship between columns within a table. In a way, it refers to both.
Mathematicians define a relation as the combination of two sets of values from different domains, with some condition applied that gives us a subset of all the possible combinations.
For example, one set is the names of baseball teams, and the other set is cities. The combination of every team to every city is a long list of pairings. But we’re interested in a particular subset of this list: the teams paired with their home city. Valid pairs include Chicago/White Sox, Chicago/Cubs, or Boston/Red Sox, but not Miami/Red Sox.
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