Question

I'm new to Notion and have a basic question:

In a relational database, various columns in a related table can serve as foreign keys back to a master table.

I don't see (yet!) how this kind of relation can be implemented in Notion. In a related question (no pun intended), how does Notion determine the appropriate foreign key in the related table? This seems to happen under the covers somehow.

Please enlighten me! Trying to understand data structures and it's confusing.

Answer 1

There is a "Page ID" for each Page (entry) in a Notion DB.
Actually there is an ID for every single block in Notion.

Behind the scenes it uses the "Page" ID as the foreign key. But it uses the "Name" column (property) for users to make the relationship.
You can rename that "Name" property anything you want. But you can not delete it or change it's Type to be different than "Text."

As a DBA for 27 years I also found Notion DBs limited when I started with Notion 6 years ago. But once you understand their structure and logic, they can be used to quickly build very flexible apps.