General design question about many-to-many relationships

From: Brenda <brendalizallen_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 9 Oct 2001 07:53:46 -0700
Message-ID: <a72e7d96.0110090653.4245965f_at_posting.google.com>

I wondered if I could get some input around handling a particular design task. Mainly I want to see if I am on the right track or if I am missing something in my thinking.

I am putting together a design for a database to support a publishing-related web site. The objects include articles, publishers, writers, content providers, and funders. All objects are of equal interest to the users. In other words, users will be as interested in finding articles as they will publishers or content providers. And what is important is that a user can, for example, find all the articles written by a particlar writer or all the articles published by a particular publisher. And writers can write for content providers or simply write an article, or both.

So I have the following so far:

TABLES:
article
publisher
writer
contentProvider
funder

article_publisher
article_writer
article_contentProvider
article_funder

writer_contentProvider
writer_publisher
etc

Being new to a project with so many m-to-m relationships, do database designs often involve numerous joining tables to provide the kind of functionality needed in my case?

For example, if a user liss all articles then they should see links to the publishers, writers, content providers, and funders associated with that article. Then, if they select, for example, a writer they should see all the articles, publishers, content providers and funders with which they are associated.

My first thought was to generally relate all items to the article. But really all entities are equally stand-alone.

Thank you for any general thoughts.

Brenda Received on Tue Oct 09 2001 - 16:53:46 CEST