A car's ignition switch serves several purposes. First, it allows you to control the power to many of the car's accessories, preventing accessories from running down the car's battery when the car is parked for a long period of time.
Cardinality is the term used in database relations to denote the occurrences of data on either side of the relation. In the common data architecture, cardinality is documented with data integrity but not with data structure. There are several types of cardinality defining relationships between occurrences of entities on two sides of the line of relationships.
Depending on its design, a database table may have many candidate keys but at most one candidate key may be distinguished as the primary key. A key constraint applies to the set of tuples in a table at any given point in time.