Need help with normalizing
Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 02:04:57 GMT
Message-ID: <dZEy9.51971$ar4.117434_at_sccrnsc03>
I'm still new to this and my question may seem dopey, but here goes:
I'm building a menu database which eventualy will allow people to order a meal by date. Only certain meals will be available on certain dates, but certain meals may be available on many dates. To make things worse I want to have the main courses and sides in separate tables so that they can be mixed and matched many-to-many.
What I've come up with so far is:
MAINCOURSES
mainCourseID
title
description
SIDES
sideID
title
description
MEALS
sideID
Where I hit a wall is date. If I make it a field in MEALS I will have redundant dates if a meal has more than one side. This could be a problem if I want to make certain main course/side relationships permanent. If I make it a separate join table with mainCourseID and date I'll run into trouble if I ever want to select a meal by date (select * from mealdate where date = somedate inner join meals on mainCourseID =... will give me all meals).
Can anyone offer any help? Do I need to clarify more?
TIA,
Seth
Received on Fri Nov 08 2002 - 03:04:57 CET