Re: Database design question

In article <3A07A322.13984646_at_elbanet.co.at>, Heinz Huber <Heinz.Huber_at_elbanet.co.at> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>you've nearly made it. Simply drop the semicolon delimited text field
>from the table of the papers. You don't need it, since this information
>is in the other two tables.
>
>Heinz
Yes, but

(1) Do not underestimate the effort needed to keep your table of authors correct. There will be misidentifications and variant spellings. Storing one name per author (which seems the natural thing to do) makes it impossible to correctly cite some papers. Storing more than one name introduces errors in things like counting papers per author.

(2) You may want to retain the order in which authors appear in the title of the paper. Just add a column to the authors_lut table to store this data.
>
>Gary Benson wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Thus, each author has one entry in the authors table, and one entry per
>> paper in the authors_lut table. This works fine, but the data
>> representing the author's names is stored twice, once in each paper they
>> wrote and once in the authors table. To fulfil my quest for efficiency,
>> is there any neater way of doing this?
Received on Tue Nov 07 2000 - 09:55:57 CET