What's the correct name for an "association table" (a many-to-many relationship)

Question

What's the correct or most popular name for an "association table"?

I've heard lookup, associative, resolving, mapping and junction table.

Solution 1

Cross reference table. CustomerProductXRef.

Solution 2

There is no "correct" name, but the academic name would be an "Associative Table" (see See the Wikipedia article Associative Entity). Other common names are (in alphabetical order):

• Association table
• Bridge table
• Cross-reference table
• Crosswalk
• Intermediary table
• Intersection table
• Join table
• Junction table
• Link table
• Linking table
• Many-to-many resolver
• Map table
• Mapping table
• Pivot Table
• Pairing table
• Relationship table
• Transition table

Note: This is contents original created by Derek Greer but that was posted as an edit to an accepted answer that totally changed the answer.

Solution 3

"Correct" depends on the modeling methodology in use. I am familiar with Chen, in which this table is the physical implementation of an Associative Entity. I suppose most popular would be directly related to most popular modeling methodology.

Wikipedia lists several names for this type of table.

Solution 4

I was taught and use the term "Join Table"

Solution 5

Depends on whom you ask. They're all correct, use the term that makes the most sense to who you're talking to.

View more solutions

Comments

[onedaywhen]

I have to say I'm totally against your naming convention. If you accept that such a table is a relationship table then the table name should reflect the relationship. I think that most data modellers would call the relationship between customers and products 'Orders'.

[onedaywhen]

+1 HOWEVER for a table that tracks a relationship, the 'business' will usually already have a name for that relationship e.g. for the business I work for, the Sales staff who look after specific customers are known as 'account managers'.

[bvj]

@onedaywhen "Orders" is normally an example of Many-to-One, not Many-to-Many despite the unfortunate reference to "Products". Furthermore, it might make sense to differentiate "Customer Orders" from "Purchase Orders". In the case of One-to-Many, I'd opt NOT to use a junction table conditions permitting. To your criticism, "Customer Product" is indeed an unusual term combination for a table name.

[Dijkgraaf]

Created answer that were rollbacked out of the accepted answer as per meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/337963/…

[Rockin4Life33]

I also use pivot table. Depending on company standards I might just use student_courses for a many-to-many on tables students and courses. Some standards I've encountered might enforce a prefix for this; such as lnk, ref, pvt, etc... e.g. lnk_students_courses.