How to implement one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships while designing tables?

Question

Can anyone explain how to implement one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships while designing tables with some examples?

Answer 1

This is a very common question, so I decided to turn this answer into a an article.

One-to-many

The one-to-many table relationship looks as follows:

In a relational database system, a one-to-many table relationship links two tables based on a Foreign Key column in the child which references the Primary Key of the parent table row.

In the table diagram above, the post_id column in the post_comment table has a Foreign Key relationship with the post table id Primary Key column:

ALTER TABLE
    post_comment
ADD CONSTRAINT
    fk_post_comment_post_id
FOREIGN KEY (post_id) REFERENCES post

One-to-one

The one-to-one table relationship looks as follows:

In a relational database system, a one-to-one table relationship links two tables based on a Primary Key column in the child which is also a Foreign Key referencing the Primary Key of the parent table row.

Therefore, we can say that the child table shares the Primary Key with the parent table.

In the table diagram above, the id column in the post_details table has also a Foreign Key relationship with the post table id Primary Key column:

ALTER TABLE
    post_details
ADD CONSTRAINT
    fk_post_details_id
FOREIGN KEY (id) REFERENCES post

Many-to-many

The many-to-many table relationship looks as follows:

In a relational database system, a many-to-many table relationship links two parent tables via a child table which contains two Foreign Key columns referencing the Primary Key columns of the two parent tables.

In the table diagram above, the post_id column in the post_tag table has also a Foreign Key relationship with the post table id Primary Key column:

ALTER TABLE
    post_tag
ADD CONSTRAINT
    fk_post_tag_post_id
FOREIGN KEY (post_id) REFERENCES post

And, the tag_id column in the post_tag table has a Foreign Key relationship with the tag table id Primary Key column:

ALTER TABLE
    post_tag
ADD CONSTRAINT
    fk_post_tag_tag_id
FOREIGN KEY (tag_id) REFERENCES tag