Data Base structure question 1

[byleth]

Hi,

i don't know if this is the right place to put this question, but i'll put it anyway..

how do i manage the problem of having a situation in wich i don't know in advance how many fields will be required?

For example,

In the process of structuring the book DB i don't know in advance how many authors a book may have... should i create fields like 'Author1', 'Author2', etc, hoping not to find a book written by 4 or 5 authors? Is there another, more efficient solution?


Thanks

 

[zemp]

Create an 'authors' table a 'book' table and 'authorlookup' table. The 'authorlookup' table will only hold foreign keys to the other two tables (two fields, you could add a third for a primary author flag). This way you can have multiple authors on a book and use the same author(s) for more than one book. When you update the author information it will be updated for all books.

Books: ID, Name, etc., etc...
Authors: ID, Name, etc., etc...
AuthorLookup: BookID, AuthorID, [Primary]

For general database discussion join forum669 as well.

zemp