What is a many-to-one relationship?

In relational databases, these many-to-one relationships are often enforced by foreign key/primary key relationships, and the relationships typically are between fact and dimension tables and between levels in a hierarchy. The relationship is often used to describe classifications or groupings. For example, in a geography schema having tables Region, State, and City, there are many states that are in a given region, but no states are in two regions. Similarly for cities, a city is in only one state (cities that have the same name but are in more than one state must be handled slightly differently). The key point is that each city exists in exactly one state, but a state may have many cities, hence the term "many-to-one."

The different elements, or levels, of a hierarchy must have many-to-one relationships between children and parent levels, regardless of whether the hierarchy is physically represented in a star or snowflake schema; that is, the data must abide by these relationships. The clean data required to enforce the many-to-one relationships is an important characteristic of a dimensional schema. Furthermore, these relationships make it possible to create DB2 Alphablox cubes out of the relational data.

If the unique field in a relational table is not repeated elsewhere in the table, you could reuse its data many times in a database. This data can be related to many contacts in the database and is an example of a many-to-one relationship.