The network structure can represent more complex logical relationships and is still
used by some mainframe DBMS packages. It allows many-to-many relationships
among records; that is, the network model can access a data element by following one
of several paths because any data element or record can be related to any number of
other data elements. For example, in Figure 5.4 , departmental records can be related
to more than one employee record, and employee records can be related to more than
one project record. Thus, you could locate all employee records for a particular department
or all project records related to a particular employee.
It should be noted that neither the hierarchical nor the network data structures are
commonly found in the modern organization. The next data structure we discuss, the
relational data structure, is the most common of all and serves as the foundation for
most modern databases in organizations.