Number 2 is good normalisation practice and it's the right way to do it.

mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles:
http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/



2008/11/20 Scott Doc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Hello wise database experts,
> This is a hard thing to explain, but I'll try. I am using Access DB. I have 
> several different tables of people, places, articles, photos, messages, 
> comments, etc.. And as you would expect these tables are linked by 3rd party 
> tables on things such as categories etc.
>
> What I would like is to create a master relationship table that can DIRECTLY 
> link any two things. Articles to people, articles to articles, photos to 
> places, etc.
>
> So I need to create a table that takes their IDs as foreign keys. I can think 
> of three methods:
> 1. LOTS of columns -- two for every table's ID (because they can also be 
> related to each other) so:
> articleID1, articleID2, photoID1 .....
> so any row would have two columns filled out, the rest null.
>
> 2. 4 columns. First two containing IDs, the second two with a key identifying 
> the TYPE of ID
> ID1, ID2, typeof1, typeof2
> so example row could be: 55, 23, article, photo
>
> 3. Make lots of tables. One for each relationship type. I don't want to do 
> this one, too many, too messy. If I've got 6 things, that's 21 tables!

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