Table Questions has Q entries. (Lets say just three for now.) What I
want is to pull where each record contains:
Table Instances has N entries.
Table Answers has Q x N entries.
I want to pull N records where each record has:
column1, column2, Answer1, Answer2, Answer3
<<<<
Note 3 questions, in the question table, 3 answers in the result record.
I think those are separate answers to each of the three questions, rather
than 3 possible answers to the same question.
ie Answer1 is the ans to q1 for this "instance" (whatever an instance
is), Answer2 is the ans to q2 ditto, and Answer3 ditto again to q3.
Scenario: A polling company. You have a list of people who have
demographic info attached. You have polls or surveys that you ask people
to complete. You provide sanitised answers to your clients with
demographic but not personal data and the poll answers.
So if instances were sets of demographic data (age group, gender,
ethnicity, relationship status) relating to people who had completed a
poll, and questions was a list of questions in a poll, then the output
records to your polling client would each combine the demographic
information from instance and the relevant answers given for each
question in the poll by the person whose demographic data you attached
the answers to.
ie the output from a poll would be the recordset:
for each person x who took part in the poll the record:
the effective join of <demographic data of person x> and <for each
question in the poll, the answer given by person x>
hence giving a scenario where multiple answers appear in a single record
without violating first normal form, because the answers are answers to
different questions, not the same question.
In fact, generating the output as:
instance data, question id, answer
would involve unneeded duplications of instance data, because each set of
instance data is associated with one specific set of answers.
I still think that the OP failed to understand what richard was
presenting, whereas those of us with more familiarity with his crap did
understand it, and that's how you and the OP got into a row about whether
the design would violate first normal form.