Cardinality: The Power of Leverage and how to use it in your business.

Coming in May, I’ll be speaking on cardinality. Cardinality is the “lever” of relational databases. It’s what allows one table to “relate” to another table. The classic example is to think of a customer table and a sales order table. One customer may have several orders. However, you don’t want to have to repeat all the information about that customer on every sales order. So you reference the customer on the sales order table and, thanks to cardinality, you can see all the customer information (address, payment terms, contact name, etc…).

In your career, you have this cardinality concept as well. As a manager, you have “many people” working for you. This allows one project or goal to be worked on by many people. Anytime you are talking about one to many, one speaker to many people, or one software tool that many use, you are taking advantage of the “lever” called cardinality.

In my presentation, I’ll be talking about the different forms of cardinality and, from a database perspective, how to build for each type. I’ll also be talking about the level of detail to use in cardinality. But for you, the take away today is, where are you using cardinality today? And where else can you take advantage of this “lever”?

Photo by: Alexander Svensson