A relationship is a link between entities. For example, in a model that manages human resources, the "Member" relationship links the entities Employee and Team and expresses that each employee works in a team, and each team has employees.
An occurrence of a relationship corresponds to one instance of each of the two entities involved in the relationship. For example, the employee Martin working in the Marketing team is one occurrence of the relationship Member.
When you generate a PDM from a CDM or LDM, relationships are generated as references.
Relationships are used in the Entity Relationship (ER), Barker, and IDEF1X modeling methodologies. In the Merise methodology associations (see Associations and Association Links (CDM)) are used to link entities. PowerDesigner lets you use either relationships or associations exclusively, or combine the two methodologies in the same model.
This section analyzes relationships in the Entity Relationship methodology, for more information on IDEF1X, see Setting CDM/LDM Model Options.