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Right now I am designing a new database for our family business. I have a few tables like in the image above, where the table only contains two foreign keys in order to represent an association between two records in two different tables.
Ex: transaction_id 123 contains the purchase of membership_id 100.
Is there a proper naming convention or a word for tables like this? For now I have been using the word "index" as a placeholder, but I am not sure if this word is appropriate.
The proper term is associative table, though most often I've heard it called is a Linker table.
Typically this table is used to support a many-to-many relationship.
As for a naming convention, that would be up to you, though I will usually just pluralize the second name, in your example I would use TransactionMemberships
linker in my names. Thank you.
Jul 31, 2016 at 6:31
is the term I have most commonly heard being used.
I've also seen it done as MembershipXTransaction (pronounced Membership by Transaction)
One other approach you should consider:
Name tables for what each record in the table represents. Use real world/business appropriate terminology as much as possible. This makes it easier for developers and business people to discuss what is in the database.
In your case, this gives you:
Note that simply slapping the names of the two tables on either end of a many-to-many relationship should not be your default choice. It often works out that this is the most appropriate option, but sometimes there are other names that better reflect real business terminology. For example: USER many-to-many with ROLE may be called ROLE_MEMBER.
