DBMS: Cardinality (Definitions)

 "The classification of a relationship; for example, one-to-many, many-to-many, and so on." (Owen Williams, "MCSE TestPrep: SQL Server 6.5 Design and Implementation", 1998)

"The number of tuples (rows) in a relationship. For example, a relationship can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many." (Microsoft Corporation, "Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Data Warehouse Training Kit", 2000)

"The number of unique values for a given column in a relational table. Low cardinality refers to a limited number of values, relative to the overall number of rows in the table." (Ralph Kimball & Margy Ross, "The Data Warehouse Toolkit 2nd Ed ", 2002)

"Cardinality denotes the maximum number of occurrences of one entity that can be related to another entity. Usually, these are expressed as “one” or “many.” Change Data Capture Change data capture is a technique for propagating only changes to source data through the data acquisition process." (Claudia Imhoff et al, "Mastering Data Warehouse Design", 2003)

"The number of distinct values in a column of a table." (Bob Bryla, "Oracle Database Foundations", 2004)

"The cardinality of a relationship represents the number of occurrences between entities. An entity with a cardinality of one is called a parent entity, and an entity with a cardinality of one or more is called a child entity." (Sharon Allen & Evan Terry, "Beginning Relational Data Modeling" 2nd Ed., 2005)

"The number of distinct values taken on by an attribute." (Christopher Adamson, "Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates", 2006)

"The number of tuples in a relation." (S. Sumathi & S. Esakkirajan, "Fundamentals of Relational Database Management Systems", 2007)

"A representation of the minimum and maximum allowed number of values for an attribute. In semantic object models, written as L.U where L and U are the lower and upper bounds. For example, 1.10 means an attribute must occur between 1 and 10 times." (Rod Stephens, "Beginning Database Design Solutions", 2008)

"A relationship in a data model denoting how many instances of one entity class can be related to an instance of another entity class - zero, one, or many." (Danette McGilvray, "Executing Data Quality Projects", 2008)

"The measure of the number of elements within a set of values. For example, the set A = { 2, 4, 6 } contains 3 elements, and has a cardinality of 3." (MongoDb, "Glossary", 2008)

"In relationships, the characteristic  of a relationship that specifies the upper and lower bounds of how many instances of one entity or object type can be related to each instance of the same or some other entity or object type. Cardinality is separately specified at each end of the relationship. At each end the choices are 0, 1, or M. Combining the cardinality at both ends of a binary relationship, yields 3 x 9 - 1 = 8 possibilities (0:0 is not a valid option)." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"The number of entities or members in a set." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"The number of entities that can exist on each side of a relationship." (Microsoft, "SQL Server 2012 Glossary", 2012)

"The number of occurrences that may exist between a pair of entities. Another way of looking at cardinality is as the number of entity occurrences applicable to a specific relationship. Sometimes the term degree is used instead of cardinality. An alternate usage of the term cardinality within the realm of database administration is a database statistic used by the relational optimizer defining the number of occurrences of a value within a column (or set of columns)." (Craig S Mullins, "Database Administration", 2012)

"The number of rows that is expected to be or is returned by an operation in an execution plan. Data has low cardinality when the number of distinct values in a column is low in relation to the total number of rows." (Oracle, "Database SQL Tuning Guide Glossary", 2013)

"The number of occurrences of two units of data that participate in a relationship" (Daniel Linstedt & W H Inmon, "Data Architecture: A Primer for the Data Scientist", 2014)

"The cardinality of a relationship is the number of instances that can be associated with each entity type in a relationship." (Robert J Glushko, "The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Ed", 2016)

"The number of rows in a database table or the number of elements in an array. See also associative array." (Sybase, "Open Server Server-Library/C Reference Manual", 2019)