So you have table books, authors and rel_books_authors where rel_books
authors has 3 entries for a book with 3 authors just using the book id and
the author is's
Olaf
On 2/9/09 10:25 AM, "PJ" <af.gour...@videotron.ca> wrote:
being a newbie to mysql, I'm a little confused about how to deal with
the following:
I am creating a database of books and have come down to this - table for
books (books) including fields for
id (primary key, auto-incr.)
title
author (could be 2 or more)
category (could be several - eg. youth, fiction, comics, and history,
for same book)
lang (eng, french, spanish, or german)
descr (short summary, if avail.)
comment (review(s))
publisher
pub_link (publisher's web addr. if avail.)
bk_cover (image, if avail.)
publish_date
ISBN
buy_link (if avail.)
The other tables would be authors, categories, and buy_links.
My problem is how to deal with several authors, categories, and links to
sellers.
What do I enter in the author field when I have several authors? Do I
set up references to the author's name(s) in another table, like (3, 7,
23) each number representing the name of an author in another table?
That is, .e.g. a number_id is entered in the author field in the books
table; in the author table, I enter John Smith in the author_id field in
the author table? Is the field for the author_id a foreign key?
Same question for categories...
buy_link - there are not many, but generally include an image and
related info to be shown next to the books info (here, I suppose, just a
few numbers will suffice to reference the table containing the
information) and this field (buy_link_id) would be a foreign key (?)
referencing the buy_link table?
So, in a query (search) I would be doing joins from the books table to
the author, category, and buy_link tables using foreign keys?
But how do I deal with a search for a book by author? If there are, say,
3 authors (Red, White, and Blue) and the search is for White, the
display should probably be formulated with a php function to display the
book listing by book title (the standard display which includes all the
relevant information about the book). So the search should first find
the name of the author in the authors table and if it exists, then the
author_id should reveal the ids for the relevant books and then these
should be printed (or echoed) in the output. Gets kind of complicated
doesn't it?
Or would it all be simpler to just enter all the authors' names in the
author field and then do a search for an author within the fields as a
string? I suspect this would be rather slow. Also, same for categories
and sellers since the whole database has to be searched?
Am I on the right track? TIA
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