General schema questions

Firstly, not sure where to post this so I hope I this is the right place, I am a bit of a rookie at this so any help would be great!...

I need to build a simple CRM database, and I am struggling with the following:

Clients can be either people or companies (companies and people have some different attributes but share a lot too, like name, address, etc.). Each client has one or more accounts. So I guess my question is... how do I link the accounts to the two different client types
(company vs. people)? Should I have one "contact" table that holds
generic data about both a company or a person (doesn't seem right to me

for some reason) or is their a way to create a client table with two subordinate tables, one for each client type?

I also need to store the relationships that people have to other people

(i.e. father, uncle, consulant, etc...) and the relationships between
firms (i.e. vendor, etc.). How is a many-to-many relationship table constructed?

THANKS! Grant Received on Mon Apr 10 2006 - 11:17:40 CDT