David Portas (3/23/2010)

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Ed-997158 (3/23/2010)

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Thanks. I was just going to ask if "bridge table" didn't already have a different terminology

"Associative Entity" is semantic modelling terminology and not a relational database term. I've never found much use in the idea of singling out tables in this way. As far as I see it, a "bridge" or "associative" table can be any table with more than one foreign key. But why do we need a special name for tables with more than one foreign key?

Fundamentally there is just one type of relational table (i.e. a table that properly represents a relation). Any such table represents an N-ary relationship between its attributes and "associative" tables are not a special case in any important respect.