I'm not 100% sure as to what you are trying to do, however, the relationship you describe could, I believe, be modeled as:
Candles (candleid, description, price) Waxes (waxid, name/description) Candle_Waxes (candleid, waxid) Thus one table holds the description and price of each candle, another table holds the name of each wax, and a third table connects the two - as a candle can have multiple waxes, the logical way to do this (to me, anyway) is via this third table - glueing the other two together. You'll need to be a bit clever when querying, as simplying joining all three together will bring back multiple rows for candles which contain more than one wax - this could be eliminated by not bringing back the wax details (and using distinct), or in a number of other ways. One other way might be to come up with a way to combine all of the wax names into one field (tricky - can't think how to do this in mysql, off the top of my head). What precisely are you trying to achieve, though - this might be completely wrong for you! Thanks, Matt -----Original Message----- From: JOHN MEYER [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 07 April 2004 15:39 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Database design question Hi, I'm writing a database for an online candle store. Here's the situation. This store sells all sorts of items including candles. Now the gist is that some of the candles can be made in different types of waxes and some only have one wax. My question is how do I resolve this when I write up the order and write up the line items. This almost seems like it is going to be some sort of a three way join or something. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
