Relations

Relations are the core primitive. A database without relations is a spreadsheet; with them, your databases become a connected model of your business.

Paired on both sides

A relation is a first-class object that ties two databases together. Creating one always creates two relation-fields — one on each database — pointing at the same relation. Link Projects and Tasks once, and:

• a Project record shows its Tasks, and
• a Task record shows its Project.

Both directions are navigable by construction — there are no orphaned one-way links.

Cardinality

• One-to-many — e.g. one Project has many Tasks; each Task has one Project.
• Many-to-many — e.g. Articles ↔ Authors.

Self-relations (a database related to itself, e.g. Task → parent Task) and cross-space relations are both allowed.

More than one self-relation on the same database

A database can hold more than one self-relation at once — a hierarchy (Parent/Sub-items, one_to_many) and a dependency graph (Blocked by/Blocks, many_to_many) coexist cleanly on the same database, each with its own cardinality. They’re fully independent: linking through one never writes the other, and a record can be a parent of one record while blocked by a completely different one at the same time.

Name each side explicitly when you add a second self-relation. Left unnamed, a self-relation defaults to the hierarchy names — Parent/Sub-items — since that’s the shape a first, unnamed self-relation almost always means. A second one needs its own names (Blocked by/Blocks, Depends on/Dependency of, or your own), so it never quietly collides with the first as “Parent 2.”

Working with relations

• In the UI, the relation picker is first-class — pick target records by title.
• Via the API, relation values are not part of a record’s values; they live in a separate links table and are returned as {id, title} chips. Set them with the links endpoints or the MCP link_records tool. See querying records.

What relations unlock

Once two databases are related, you can:

• Look up a related record’s field (surface the Client’s owner on each Project).
• Roll up related records (sum a Client’s Opportunity amounts, count open Tasks).
• Reference both in formulas ({Budget} - {Spent}).