matthewgsommers / sql-references-join-tables

An Introduction to many-to-many relationships in PostgeSQL

An Introduction to many-to-many relationships in PostgreSQL

Prerequisites

• An Introduction to PostgreSQL Foreign Key References

Objectives

By the end of this, developers should be able to:

• Create tables with foreign key references.
• Create join tables to represent many-to-many relationships.
• Insert rows in join tables to create many-to-many relationships.
• Select data about many-to-many relationships using join tables.

Preparation

1. Fork and clone this repository.
2. Create a new branch, training, for your work.
3. Install dependencies if necessary.

Modeling relationships

Our library has books and authors, but it won't be much of a library without borrowers. Our clinic has patients and doctors, but how do we schedule appointments? Our cookbook has ingredients and recipes, but only allows a particular ingredient in a single recipe.

• In our library, how do we connect borrowers to books.
• How should clinic administrators record appointments?
• What does our cookbook need to include ingredients in recipes?

Let's model these new entities (objects) and their relationships to our existing entities (objects).

Creating many-to-many relationships between entities

In an RDBMs, we do this using join tables

Demonstration: Create tables for borrowers and loans

We'll create SQL scripts in scripts/library to add a borrowers table and populate it from data in the patients table (since we only need a subset of the columns from data/people.csv).

Then we'll create a loans table and populate it using INSERT statements.

Code along: Create and populate an appointments table

We'll create scripts in scripts/clinic to add an appointments table and populate it using INSERT statements.

Lab: Create and populate a recipe_ingredients table

We'll create scripts in scripts/cookbook to add a recipe_ingredients table and populate it using INSERT statements. Then we'll remove recipe_id from ingredients.

Retrieving data using join tables

Demonstration: Retrieve information about library loans

We'll create scripts in scripts/library to retrieve information about borrowers, loans, and books.

What happens if we try to DELETE a borrower or a book?

Code along: Retrieve information about appointments

We'll create scripts in scripts/clinic to retrieve information about patients, doctors and appointments.

Lab: Retrieve information about recipe ingredients

We'll create scripts in scripts/cookbook to retrieve information about recipes.

Additional Resources

• Constraints - An overview of the variety of constraints that PostgreSQL provides.
• CREATE TABLE - detailed documentation of PostgreSQL's version of the SQL CREATE TABLE command.
• ALTER TABLE - detailed documentation of PostgreSQL's version of the SQL ALTER TABLE command.
• Index Introduction - The introductory section of the chapter on indexes in PostgreSQL.
• CREATE INDEX - detailed documentation of PostgreSQL's version of the SQL CREATE INDEX command.
• UPDATE - detailed documentation of PostgreSQL's version of the SQL UPDATE command.
• INSERT - detailed documentation of PostgreSQL's version of the SQL INSERT INTO command.
• Joins Between Tables - An introduction to querying multiple tables
• SELECT - detailed documentation of PostgreSQL's version of the SQL SELECT command.

License

1. All content is licensed under a CC­BY­NC­SA 4.0 license.
2. All software code is licensed under GNU GPLv3. For commercial use or alternative licensing, please contact [e-mail].