Re: Need help with normalizing

On Fri, 08 Nov 2002 02:04:57 GMT, "Seth Brewer" <fieury_at_hotmail.com> wrote:

>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.

You need to record the fact each meal is available on specific dates. So a table of MEAL_AVAILABILITY seems to be in order.

Bare bones . . .

 MEAL_AVAILABILITY
 --
 mainCourseID
 sideID
 dateAvailable

 PRIMARY KEY        (mainCourseID, sideID, DateAvailable)
 FOREIGN KEY        (mainCourseID, sideID) 
   REFERENCES MEALS (mainCourseID, sideID)

You'll have to flesh that out and translate that into your dbms's language.

-- 
Mike Sherrill
Information Management Systems