Question

I was thinking the other day on normalization, and it occurred to me, I cannot think of a time where there should be a 1:1 relationship in a database.

• Name:SSN? I’d have them in the same table.
• PersonID:AddressID? Again, same table.

I can come up with a zillion examples of 1:many or many:many (with appropriate intermediate tables), but never a 1:1.

Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

A 1:1 relationship typically indicates that you have partitioned a larger entity for some reason. Often it is because of performance reasons in the physical schema, but it can happen in the logic side as well if a large chunk of the data is expected to be ‘unknown’ at the same time (in which case you have a 1:0 or 1:1, but no more).

As an example of a logical partition: you have data about an employee, but there is a larger set of data that needs to be collected, if and only if they select to have health coverage. I would keep the demographic data regarding health coverage in a different table to both give easier security partitioning and to avoid hauling that data around in queries unrelated to insurance.

An example of a physical partition would be the same data being hosted on multiple servers. I may keep the health coverage demographic data in another state (where the HR office is, for example) and the primary database may only link to it via a linked server… avoiding replicating sensitive data to other locations, yet making it available for (assuming here rare) queries that need it.

Physical partitioning can be useful whenever you have queries that need consistent subsets of a larger entity.