A Review of Record Relationships
Records can be related in three ways. A tree relationship has one or more one-to-many relationships, but each child record has at most one parent. The occurrence of faculty data shown in Figure H-12 illus-trates a tree. There are several 1:N relationships, but any child record has only one parent, as shown in Figure H-13.
A simple network is a collection of records and the 1:N relationships among them. What distinguishes a simple network from a tree is the fact that in a simple network, a child can have more than one parent as long as the parents are different record types. The occurrence of a simple network of students, advis-ers, and major fields of study shown in Figure H-14 is represented schematically in Figure H-15.