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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/7510
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Does the publication in question have relevant style guidelines? (I'm assuming not or you wouldn't be asking here.)

In your proposed solution, you are using both formatting and (initial) explicit labeling to convey information: "the **trees** table" rather than just " **trees**", for instance. This is good; it reinforces your formatting convention while facilitating scanning of the text. (It would be easy to miss that common words like "trees" are actually proper names in your database.) You may encounter sentences where this verbosity gets in your way and you're tempted to use just the formatting; that can work well for later stages of a description, like in your "but..." clause, but I recommend leading off any new discussion with the more-verbose form.

In addition, in technical writing (as distinct from other prose), it is helpful to be ruthlessly consistent in your use of technical terms, lest a reader see the absence of something as significant. In your example, you say a tree "can be associated with" one or more apples; when talking about the reverse I recommend using the "associated" language rather than the more colloquial "comes from", especially if there actually isn't any directionality to the associations. (That is, since you're talking about databases rather than graphs or pointers, I assume you mean bi-directional joins.) For an audience fluent in databases I wouldn't make this recommendation, but your audience is more general (judging from comments on the question) so give them the extra help.

This is tangential to your question but I couldn't help noticing: is _the color field_ red/green/null, or is _the value of_ the color field red/green/null? That is, does the field describe the column (as you said up front), or does it describe the "cell" (the value of that attribute for a particular record)? I bring this up because it's another example of the kind of precision that's really important, particularly for an audience that isn't already familiar with the domain and its terminology.

Putting all this together, I would revise your paragraph thus:

> Each `tree` record in the **trees** table is associated with zero or more `apple` records in the **apples** table, but each `apple` is associated with only one `tree`. Each `apple` has a _color_ field with a value of "red", "green", or NULL.

Original score: 1