Online Computer Terms Dictionary - R

repeating group

<database> Any attribute that can have multiple values associated with a single instance of some entity. For example, a book might have multiple authors.

Such a "-to-many" relationship might be represented in an unnormalised relational database as multiple author columns in the book table or a single author(s) column containing a string which was a list of authors. Converting this to "first normal form" is the first step in database normalisation. Each author of the book would appear in a separate row along with the book's primary key. Later nomalisation stages would move the book-author relationship into a separate table to avoid repeating other book attibutes (e.g. title, publisher) for each author.

(2005-07-28)