This is probably going more into db design than pure mysql issues...on the other hand if performance is at stake with these different designs..... After several inputs - which I am EXTREMELY thankful for - here are some of my thoughts. The solution using Joseph's table aliases works beautifully. With that said, I also see the value in using separate tables. And from a design perspective, which I really enjoy working on, that seems the better solution given the ease of maintenance on one subject entities.
However, in this case I believe the table "groupmembers" which is a table of all the "groups" and its members, with the dates they were in those groups - a point Arthur makes which is already in place - works as effectively as creating separate tables, and makes the search algorithm easier to code - at least for me! ;-) . If an artist recorded with multiple groups, their id appears in the groupmembers table associated with all groups they performed with and the dates. This seems similar to me as an example I saw regarding bowling league teams and captains. The captains were also bowlers so a self-relation was used keeping all the "bowlers" in one table. In large DB's, such as an Amazon, or CD now, you can only search by artist, song, album title, etc. There are no "group" searches. So if they are parsing out groups into another table then I would love to see the code for that 'cause they are quick! Classical searches differ given the conductor, orchestra, etc. Which makes me wonder why Jazz searches are not set up that way as well. hmmmm I have a "linking" table of sorts to combine artists with groups, but eliminate an additional group table. Am I missing something here that should be obvious as to a serious problem with the one table design? Yes, I'm trying to defend the one table design. hehe. Honestly I had given it up for Arthur and Pete's design until Joseph showed me the table alias method. So we can blame him! ;-) Thanks for the input and feel free to fire away with any other thoughts and suggestions. I'm new to this mysql stuff. It rocks! Franklin __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
