Item relationships
When you model relationships, you relate items or entities together under a certain relationship such as relating two items for up-sell, or relating an item to its suppliers.
You might define a set of attributes on top of a relationship. For example, supplier cost can be an attribute on the item-supplier relationship because it signifies the supplier cost of that particular item.
Volume considerations for three-way relationships
You must take note of the volume of the attribute relationship records. For example, take the case of one million items where an item can have a maximum of twenty suppliers. You have a possibility of twenty million item-supplier records. If another dimension such as locations is added to the relationship, for example, fifty locations per item, then the number increases to 1,000,000,000 item-supplier-location records.
This shows that the way that you model such relationships can make or break the implementation. You can receive volume such as this when you model any relationship that form a three-way join of three attributes. The item-supplier-location relationship is a common example of a relationship that can create a high volume of records. You must model relationships carefully. Because there is no accurate approach, you must seek the advice of the IBM® Product Master services, engineering, and architecture teams on whether the proposed model will be supported by Product Master and whether there are any other ways of fulfilling the requirement.
Two-way relationships
You can be model two-way relationships in various ways in Product Master:
- With relationship attributes
- With linked catalogs
- With hierarchies
- With multi-occurring attributes
The best approach for modeling a two-way relationship depends on whether the type of relationship and whether it is an item-to-item relationship or a item-to-other entity relationship.