When talking about database query optimization, cardinality refers to the data in a column of a table, specifically how many unique values are in it. This statistic helps with planning queries and optimizing the execution plans.
Cardinality refers to the uniqueness of data contained in a column. If a column has a lot of duplicate data (e.g. a column that stores either "true" or "false"), it has low cardinality, but if the values are highly unique (e.g. Social Security numbers), it has high cardinality.
It depends a bit on context. Cardinality means the number of something but it gets used in a variety of contexts.
When you're building a data model, cardinality often refers to the number of rows in table A that relate to table B. That is, are there 1 row in B for every row in A (1:1), are there N rows in B for every row in A (1:N), are there M rows in B for every N rows in A (N:M), etc.
When you are looking at things like whether it would be more efficient to use a b*-tree index or a bitmap index or how selective a predicate is, cardinality refers to the number of distinct values in a particular column. If you have a PERSON table, for example, GENDER is likely to be a very low cardinality column (there are probably only two values in GENDER) while PERSON_ID is likely to be a very high cardinality column (every row will have a different value).
When you are looking at query plans, cardinality refers to the number of rows that are expected to be returned from a particular operation.
There are probably other situations where people talk about cardinality using a different context and mean something else.
Definition:
We have tables in database. In relational database, we have relations among the tables. These relations can be one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many. These relations are called 'cardinality'.
Significant of cardinality:
Many relational databases have been designed following stick business rules.When you design the database we define the cardinality based on the business rules. But every objects has its own nature as well.
When you define cardinality among object you have to consider all these things to define the correct cardinality.