Understanding Data and Relationships

Data administration is about relationships. Understanding the relationships between your data, and how they tie your various tables together, is at the heart of any good ServiceNow administrator or developer.

There are a number of different types of data relationships, with different structures to suit different purposes. In this chapter, we're going to learn what those relationship types are, how they're structured, and how we can use them effectively within our ServiceNow instance. We'll learn not just about relationships defined by linking one record to another, but also about hierarchical relationships and inheritance.

In this chapter, we'll learn about:

• General database structures and relationships
• One-to-many relationships in ServiceNow
• Many-to-many relationships in ServiceNow
• Enforcing one-to-one relationships
• Defining custom relationships
• Database table inheritance