# Miscellaneous > Database Design >  tables

## Luis Sanchez

Can someone explain parent, child, and pivot tables please?

Thank you,
Luis Sanchez

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## Jason Doyle

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Luis Sanchez at 6/2/99 9:36:58 AM

Can someone explain parent, child, and pivot tables please?

Thank you,
Luis Sanchez

Hi Luis:

I can explain two of the three.  I am not familiar with a pivot table.. But, I will let you know what a parent and child table are all about.

Think of this in terms of a relational join.  A parent/child is a one to many relationship.  The parent is the ONE, and the child is the MANY.

Example:

Let&#39;s say you have a parent table called OFFICES and a child table called OFFICE_ASSIGNMENTS.

Your OFFICES table could hold thousands of records of unique political offices.  Now, let&#39;s say you want to &#34;assign&#34; candidates to each of those unique offices, to keep track of who is running for each political office. 

In this case, you would fire your child form (office_assingment) off of your parent form (offices) to assign as many candidates running for that office as you wish. You could assign 1,000+ candidates to that particular office. By the way, you would fire your child form by throwing a command button on your parent form.  

In this example, you have &#34;one&#34; office (Mayor of Washington D.C., for example), and you are assigning &#34;many&#34; candidates to that office. 

Hope this helps

jcd

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