Relational
There seem to be a common misconception about the meaning of the term “relational” (in the context of “relational databases”).
There are a few commonly-used phrases:
- “Relational data”
- “Relational database”
- “Relation”
- “Relationship”
One of these things is not like the others.
A classic demonstration of the misunderstanding:
Collectively, multiple tables of data are called relational data because it is the relations, not just the individual datasets, that are important. Relations are always defined between a pair of tables.
The Drizzle ORM also gets this annoyingly wrong, although at least they didn’t bake the word relation into the library’s API surface like Eloquent.
A relation, properly defined, is closely analogous to a table. Relational data is just data stored in tables.
If somebody asks you “if your data is relational”, they may be suffering from this misunderstanding.