Database design question

Hi,

I'm a bit of a newcomer to relational databases, and I have a question about how best to implement something. Hopefully I have the right NG...

Basically, I have a database of technical papers, each with a variable number of authors. The authors are currently stored as a semicolon delimited text field.

So that I can find papers with the same authors, I need some way to remove this delimited list. Currently what I have done is to create 2 new tables, authors and authors_lut. Authors contains a unique integer Id and a text field containing the author's name, and authors_lut contains the integer Id of the author and the integer Id of the article.

Thus, each author has one entry in the authors table, and one entry per paper in the authors_lut table. This works fine, but the data representing the author's names is stored twice, once in each paper they wrote and once in the authors table. To fulfil my quest for efficiency, is there any neater way of doing this?

Thanks,

Gary

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Before you buy. Received on Mon Nov 06 2000 - 18:24:22 CET