Re: Need help with normalizing

Heinz,

Wow, that ads a dimension I couldn't even see! I keep thinking that I'm smart - and then I post a question to a news group and find that releative to a lot of other people I am not.

Thanks, this is a big help!
Seth

"Heinz Huber" <hhuber_at_racon-linz.at> wrote in message news:Xns92C05A308188Ehhuberraconlinzat_at_195.3.96.116...
> "Seth Brewer" <fieury_at_hotmail.com> wrote in
> news: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
> > mainCourseID
> > 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).
>
> It seems that you're looking for a structure like this:
>
> Meals
> mealID (PK)
> mainCourseID (FK)
> date
>
> MealSides
> mealID (PK, FK)
> sideID (PK, FK)
>
>
> Alternatively, you could try the following:
> Meals
> mainCourseID (PK, FK)
> date (PK)
>
> MealSides
> mainCourseID (PK, FK)
> date (PK, FK)
> sideID (PK, FK)
>
> That way, you can have a main course only once per date and have one set
of
> sides for this main course.
>
> hth,
> Heinz
Received on Fri Nov 08 2002 - 15:50:40 CET