relationeel

Relationeel is a Dutch adjective meaning relational or pertaining to relations. In information technology, it is commonly used to refer to the relational model of data, and to databases that implement this model. The relational model was proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970 and represents data as a set of relations, which in practical terms are tables consisting of rows (tuples) and columns (attributes). A database schema defines a set of relations and the types of data they store.

Data integrity is maintained through keys: a primary key uniquely identifies each tuple in a relation, and foreign keys establish referential integrity between relations. Normalization organizes data into related tables to reduce redundancy and update anomalies. Queries and data manipulation in relational systems are typically expressed in a structured query language (SQL), which provides operations such as select, insert, update, delete, and join to combine data from multiple relations.

Relational databases are widely used due to data independence, a standard interface, and strong theoretical foundations. They support ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) to ensure reliable transactions. Over time, the landscape expanded to distributed and columnar relational databases, and to alternative data models, but the relational paradigm remains a foundational approach in data management.

Outside computing, the term "relationeel" is primarily encountered in Dutch-language technical writing and is generally reserved for contexts describing relations between data or entities in the relational sense, rather than broader social or linguistic relations.