Hybrid Relationships 

The sibling and parent/child relationship types described above are the full set of product-level relationships explicitly supported by MDM.

However, if a relationship embodies both sibling and parent/child data, and/or the parent/child data relates records both within the main table and between the main table and one or more subtables, you can create multiple independent product relationships to store the data, and then combine them at the presentation layer into a hybrid relationship.

In this way, individual relationships act as building blocks that can be combined into complex hybrid relationships to represent many different multi-dimensional relationships between main table records and/or non-main table records, and that can be navigated in a variety of ways.

For example, an “interchange” sibling relationship can be combined with a “cross-reference” parent/child relationship (main/subtable) to represent all of the different SKUs and part numbers that can be used to identify and locate a particular product or group of products.

Alternatively, if the same set of cross-reference part numbers applies to all products in the interchange set, then you can eliminate the need to maintain cross-reference part numbers individually for each product by replacing the sibling and parent/child relationships above with two parent/child relationships from a subtable of interchange groups (really, a “super-table”) to: (1) the main table (the “interchange product groups” relationship); and (2) the part number subtable (the “interchange part number groups” relationship).