The Associative Model of Data is a data model which, it is claimed, offers numerous advantages over the current industry-leading relational database technology used in the largest percentage of modern database systems.

Other data models, such as the relational model and the object data model are record-based. Record-based models involve encompassing attributes about a thing, such as a car in a record structure (where attributes might be registration, colour, make, model, etc).

In the associative model, everything which has “discrete independent existence” is modelled as an entity, and relationships between them are modelled as associations. The granularity at which data is represented is similar to schemes presented by Chen (Entity-relationship model); Bracchi, Paolini and Pelagatti (Binary Relations); and Senko (The Entity Set Model).

A number of claims made about the model by Simon Williams, in his book “The Associative Model of Data”, distinguish the associative model from more traditional models.

Brief Introduction

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In an associative database management system, data and metadata (data about data) are stored as two types of things:

• Items, each of which has a unique identifier and a name.

• Links, each of which has a unique identifier, together with the unique identifiers of three other things, that represent the source, verb and target of a fact that is recorded about the source in the database. Each of the three things identified by the source, verb and target may each be either a link or an item.

Here's how the associative model would use these two structures to store the piece of information Flight BA1234 arrived at London Heathrow on 12-Dec-05 at 10:25am. There are seven items: the four nouns Flight BA1234, London Heathrow, 12-Dec-05 and 10:25am, and the three verbs arrived at, on and at. We need three links to store the data. They are:

Flight BA1234 arrived at Heathrow Airport

... on 12-Aug-05

... at 10:25am

The first link has Flight BA1234 as its source, arrived at as its verb and Heathrow Airport as its target. The second link has the first link as its source, on as its verb and the item 12-Aug-05 as its target. (A link that begins with an ellipsis "..." has the previous link as its source.) The third link has the second link as its source, at as its verb and 10:25am as its target.

Here's an alternative way to write the same thing using parentheses:

((Flight BA1234 arrived at Heathrow Airport) on 12-Aug-05) at 10:25am

An associative database may be regarded as comprising two tables: one for items and one for links. Each item and each link has a meaningless number (called a surrogate) as an identifier:

Items
Identifier	Name
77	Flight BA1234
08	London Heathrow
32	12-Aug-05
48	10:25am
12	arrived at
67	on
09	at

 

Links
Identifier	Source	Verb	Target
74	77	12	08
03	74	67	32
64	03	09	48

External links

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• The Associative Model of Data By Simon Williams

Database management systems