a layman's term for identifying relationship

Question

There are couples of questions around asking for difference / explanation on identifying and non-identifying relationship in relationship database.

My question is, can you think of a simpler term for these jargons? I understand that technical terms have to be specific and unambiguous though. But having an 'alternative name' might help students relate more easily to the concept behind.

We actually want to use a more layman term in our own database modeling tool, so that first-time users without much computer science background could learn faster.

cheers!

Answer 1

I often see child table or dependent table used as a lay term. You could use either of those terms for a table with an identifying relationship

Then say a referencing table is a table with a non-identifying relationship.

For example, PhoneNumbers is a child of Users, because a phone number has an identifying relationship with its user (i.e. the primary key of PhoneNumbers includes a foreign key to the primary key of Users).

Whereas the Users table has a state column that is a foreign key to the States table, making it a non-identifying relationship. So you could say Users references States, but is not a child of it per se.

Answer 2

I think belongs to would be a good name for the identifying relationship.

A "weak entity type" does not have its own key, just a "partial key", so each entity instance of this weak entity type has to belong to some other entity instance so it can be identified, and this is an "identifying relationship". For example, a landlord could have a database with apartments and rooms. A room can be called kitchen or bathroom, and while that name is unique within an apartment, there will be many rooms in the database with the name kitchen, so it is just a partial key. To uniquely identify a room in the database, you need to say that it is the kitchen in this particular apartment. In other words, the rooms belong to apartments.