On 2025-Aug-22, Tom Lane wrote:
> Hmmm ... maybe something like
>
> Mathematically, a "relation" is a set of tuples; this is the sense
> meant in the term "relational database".
>
> In Postgres, "relation" is commonly used to mean a database object
> that has a name and a list of attributes defined in a specific
> order. Tables, sequences, views, foreign tables, materialized
> views, composite types, and indexes are all relations. A relation
> in this sense is a container or descriptor for a set of tuples.
>
> "Class" is an alternative but archaic term. The system catalog
> pg_class holds an entry for each Postgres relation.
Thanks, pushed like that. I changed "a database object" to "an SQL
object", because that's a term we have a definition for.
(I also wrote "PostgreSQL" where you had "Postgres". I think it might
be okay now to change the product name in various places here, but it
seems better to do it consistently across the whole page.)
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Álvaro Herrera Breisgau, Deutschland — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
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