On: Ask HN: Do you use foreign keys in relational data...

[zergu]

"Relational" comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model Table = relation

[IshKebab → zergu]

I followed the etymology further because that makes no sense on the face of it. It's referring to the relationship between columns. The table is a mapping from one column to another so there is a relationship between them.

This example makes it pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finitary_relation#Example

I always thought it was referring to foreign keys too. Pretty bad name in hindsight.

[zupa-hu → IshKebab]

Thanks for elaborating on this! I’ve learned something today.

I couldn’t make up a more misleading name if my life depended on it..

EDIT: Reading the page in more detail, it seems to me relational means both. Indeed each field of a row has a relationship (they belong to the same row after all), but there are other kinds of relationships like one-to-many achieved by foreign keys.

Eg.: each row of a class table corresponds to a class, and a class corresponds to multiple students, so the relationship between the class table and the student table is "one to many"