normalization problems
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 12:24:51 GMT
Message-ID: <3a41f67c.6688045_at_news.ntlworld.com>
Hi,
I am working on a database which contains data about Vendors and
Products, and I'm having problems structuring the data.
The Products fall into a range of categories (such as Budgeting &
Planning, Knowledge Management, Business Scorecards...).
Each of these categories have different attributes that will be
associated with them. Each Product may fall into more than one of
the categories.
There will also be some statistical attributes that are the same for
all products, regardless of category.
The only way I can see of doing this is by having a Product table
(containing the common statistics) with a one-to-many relationship to
a Product-Category table with a one-to-one relationship to each of the
category tables, but this seems awful!
The Product-Category table would contain the Product Code and a
Category identifier, so I could code around having to search through
16 category tables, if I did not know which category(s) a product was
in.
This seems like a really bad way of doing things - I'd be really
grateful if someone could point me in the right direction!
Thanks,