Question

I just want to know what is a parent table and what is a child table in databases. Can you please show me an example so I understand how it works please.

Thank You

Answer 1

Child tables and parent tables are just normal database tables, but they’re linked in a way that’s described by a parent–child relationship.

It’s usually used to specify where one table’s value refers to the value in another table (usually a primary key of another table).

For example, imagine a news article. This could be represented by a table called articles and has fields for id, headline, body, published_date and author. But instead of placing a name in the author field, you could instead put the ID value of a user in a separate table—maybe called authors—that has information on authors such as id, name, and email.

Therefore, if you need to update an author’s name, you only need to do so in the authors (parent) table; because the articles (child) table only contains the ID of the corresponding author record.

Hope this helps you understand better.