Ternary Relationship or (n-ary) I'm trying to find the difference in terms of modeling a ternary relationship v/s a binary relationship in the following case. Any piece of advise would help me a lot.


Company has editors who are responsible for 1 or more papers.
An Author works with an editor on each paper, furthermore, he may be working in another paper with another editor.
Each Author may have none or more papers.


I managed to model this problem in two ways

First using a Ternary Relationship.


Second one is using two binary relationships and enforcing that each paper has 1 editor.


Is there going to be a difference in the tables that will follow any of this ways? I've tried to find any but failed to do so.
Yes, there is a difference.

In the 1st design, an author-paper combination is related to one editor. So a paper can have many editors, as many as its authors.

In the 2nd design, a paper is related to one editor. And all its authors are related  - through the paper - to the same editor.