@flaxeater said:@rel said:That makes it look like you think that the ability to declare relationships between tables is why we call it the relational model. But that's not why it's called the relational model, nor why we refer to implementations as "relational databases". Because your not coming right out and saying it.  Your refering to relational algebra in comparison to what a relational database is right?  You don't really need to go that far. A relational databse is called that because each table forms a relation (in the mathematically defined sense of a set of n-tuples). This is different from the older hierarchical databases. Of course, in this sense, a collection of flat files is a relational database as well...