Question

Consider an association indicating professional licensing status between an Accountant class and a States class in a Unified Modeling Language (UML) Class diagram. The multiplicities next to the Accountants class are 0..* and the multiplicities next to the States class are 0..*. Which of the following is the best way to implement that association in your database?

• Post the primary key of Accountants as a foreign key in States.
• Post the primary key of States as a foreign key in Accountants.
• Create a linking table.

Answer 1

The best way to implement this association in your database is: Creating a linking table

Answer 2

The best way to implement the association between the Accountant class and the States class in the database is to create a linking table.

A linking table, also known as an association table or junction table, is a table that is used to represent a many-to-many relationship between two other tables. In this case, the multiplicities 0..* for both the Accountant class and the States class indicate that there can be many accountants associated with many states.

Creating a linking table allows you to handle the many-to-many relationship between accountants and states efficiently. The linking table will have foreign keys referencing the primary keys of both the Accountants table and the States table, allowing you to establish the associations between accountants and states.

The other options, posting the primary key of Accountants as a foreign key in States or posting the primary key of States as a foreign key in Accountants, would not accurately represent the many-to-many relationship and would not allow you to store multiple associations between accountants and states.

Therefore, the best way to implement the association is to create a linking table.