Is there an official name for the many-to-many relationship table in a database schema?

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Most of the projects I've worked on have required many-to-many relationships in the database schema. For example, you might have the concept of Users and Groups, and the database might contain a table User, a table Group, and a table UserGroup to relate the two.

I'm interested in the conceptual name of the UserGroup table in that example.

I've grown accustomed to calling them "swing tables" because that's how I learned it, but I haven't heard other people use that term in a while.

Instead, I've heard all of the following (including some new ones, thanks to all of you!):

  • Association table
  • Bridge table
  • Cross-reference table
  • Gerund (E.F. Codd, creator of the relational model, may prefer this)
  • Intersection tables
  • Join table (most search results on Google...see answer below)
  • Junction table (Wikipedia favors this one)
  • Link table (Fowler likes this one)
  • Many-to-many relationship tables
  • Map table
  • Reference table
  • Relationship table
  • Swing table

Is there an official name for this kind of table, with a source to back its official-ness?

10 Answers

This is HIGHLY unscientific, but I thought it would be interesting to see how many Google results were associated with the combination of common answers to this question and the term "many to many".

Based on this, it looks like "join table" is the most commonly used term for the...um...joining table in a many-to-many relationship.


The combined search terms

"join table" "many to many"

return around 13,700 results in Google.

"link table" "many to many"

returns around 4,700.

"junction table" "many to many"

returns around 3,500.

"association table" "many to many"

returns around 3,300.

"relationship table" "many to many"

returns around 3,200.

"intersection table" "many to many"

returns around 1,500.

"cross-reference table" "many to many"

brings back 1,000.

gerund "many to many"

only returns 450.

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