Let's say I have a two tables - book and author. A book can have many authors and an author can have many books, which means they are in a many to many relationship and I'll need a third table to implement that.
I really want to avoid this, as I am a beginner and this makes the queries more complicated for me.
So my question is : what would be the best way to implement this type of relationship excluding many-to-many?
I was thinking just to put a foreign key in each table so I have an authoridFK in my books table and bookIdFK in my authors table. But I am not sure what will type of a relationship would that be, will it me correct and how it will look on an ERD?
Can someone clarify these to me?
The 'best', and most standard way is to use a third table to maintain the relationship.
As for query complexity, you can either look into using JOIN in your queries or getting an ORM which handles these type of relationships for you.
An example join query for the given context which will return a list of all authors and all books they have contributed to would look like this:
select a.AuthorName, b.BookName
from author a
join AuthorBookMapping m on m.AuthorID = a.AuthorID
join Book b on m.BookID = b.BookID
The intermediate table is the only correct way to build your relation.
This logic does not complicate the structure, but on the opposite, it allows to comply with good practices:
each data item must be located in a unique place in the database
each record (object) must have a unique primary key.
This way you can both link authors to their books, possibly assign several authors to the same book, and of course several books to the same author.
Advanced CRUD systems also allow you to display the author(s) in the book list and edit these relationships.
Here's a tutorial about relationships in a MySQL database
It explains the main things about direct / indirect relationships, and identifying / non-identifying relationships
Related
I am working on a university project for a library and I have a table USERS with a column
ROLES ( possible values: member, librarian, admin).
I've always heard that I shouldn't use many to many relationships. The reason such a relationship exists here is because a LOAN has user_id for the borrower and Id for the Librarian that was working at the time. (Table LOAN connects to table BOOK with other relationships as authors and genre etc. not needed for this question)
QUESTION
I don't see a way or a point to split this relationship in a many-to-one and one-to-many. Is what I am doing wrong for some reason?
Edit*: Forgot to add FK in my diagram for Librarian_borrowed, Librarian_returned, but they are FK's. Also a librarian can also borrow a book.
Thank you for your time.
P.S. I've thought about splitting the table USERS or using generalization, but I don't see any real benefits and I quite like it this way, keeps things easier for my project. This is not my question but I'm sure someone might comment on it.
No need for m2m relationships. You need to add multiple FKs to LOAN table, one for each relationship to the USER table e.g. borrower_id, librarian_id, etc.
They will each reference a different user record (unless, of course the librarian also borrows a book)
Need help with a orm request.
There are 2 tables. Author and Book (names for example, so you don't need to look at the logic), linked through FK.
class Book(models.Models):
title = models.Charfield(...)
class Author(models.Model):
book = models.ForeignKey(Book)
Need to group the authors by the book and go through them in a loop. The question is how to select only the last 50 authors of each book.
I can write this:
for book in Book.all()
for author in book.author_set.all()[:50]:
....
But this is not an optimal solution.
Bad answer, I didn't realize that slicing implies a new query. My bad, don't look further down.
To optimize your query, you need to use the prefetch_related() method:
prefetch_related()
Returns a QuerySet
that will automatically retrieve, in a single batch, related objects
for each of the specified lookups.
This has a similar purpose to select_related, in that both are
designed to stop the deluge of database queries that is caused by
accessing related objects, but the strategy is quite different.
select_related works by creating an SQL join and including the fields
of the related object in the SELECT statement. For this reason,
select_related gets the related objects in the same database query.
However, to avoid the much larger result set that would result from
joining across a ‘many’ relationship, select_related is limited to
single-valued relationships - foreign key and one-to-one.
prefetch_related, on the other hand, does a separate lookup for each
relationship, and does the ‘joining’ in Python. This allows it to
prefetch many-to-many and many-to-one objects, which cannot be done
using select_related, in addition to the foreign key and one-to-one
relationships that are supported by select_related.
for book in Book.all().prefetch_related()
for author in book.author_set.all()[:50]
You also need to order your book.author_set queryset to make sure you get the latest entries.
When talking about n to m relationships in a database, an intersection table is often mentioned.
E.g. there are authours and books, an author can have a relationship to many books and vice versa.
But: How can I model the relationship, that the authors can also have relationships among them and books, too?
E.g.
- Author A has written Book 1 and Book 2, and Author A is a friend of Author B.
- Book 1 is related to the same genre as Book 2.
Do I have multiple Intersection tables then?
E.g. An Author - Book Relationship table, an Author -Author "Friend"-Relationship table and a Book-Book "Genre" Relationship?
I am a beginner concerning databases and SQL...
Thank you for your help,
Anne
To create a simple 1:n relation-ship, it's enough to have one FOREIGN KEY-column to specify the related record.
But whenever you want to model a m:n relationship, or you might need to add additional information to a 1:n relationship, you'll need a mapping table.
mapping tables with 1:n relations: Imagine the case, that a book can have exactly one current reader. If you'd use a FK CurrentReaderID in the Book table, you would not be able to find previous readers once you've changed the FK-value.
mapping tables with m:n relations: Think of the relation as an object on its own with its own specific detail data (when, validTo, createdBy...)
And yes: In a well designed database you'll find many tables with a wide range of different relations / mappings among them.
Yes, this is fairly standard. If books can have multiple genres, a Book-Genre table containing Genre IDs from one side and Book Ids from the other is perfectly appropriate. The Author-Friend relation is a bit trickier as the intersection table will join to the Author table twice (once for each author in the author-friend relation), but is essentially the same.
As you've identified, these are the same as a Book-Author table that links books to their authors on a n:m basis.
Look for student-teacher-course examples as they are similar and often part of an n:m explanation.
I am learning about databases and SQL for the first time. In the text I'm reading (Oracle 11g: SQL by Joan Casteel), it says that "many-to-many relationships can't exist in a relational database." I understand that we are to avoid them, and I understand how to create a bridging entity to eliminate them, but I am trying to fully understand the statement "can't exist."
Is it actually physically impossible to have a many-to-many relationship represented?
Or is it just very inefficient since it leads to a lot of data duplication?
It seems to me to be the latter case, and the bridging entity minimizes the duplicated data. But maybe I'm missing something? I haven't found a concrete reason (or better yet an example) that explains why to avoid the many-to-many relationship, either in the text or anywhere else I've searched. I've been searching all day and only finding the same information repeated: "don't do it, and use a bridging entity instead." But I like to ask why. :-)
Thanks!
Think about a simple relationship like the one between Authors and Books. An author can write many books. A book could have many authors. Now, without a bridge table to resolve the many-to-many relationship, what would the alternative be? You'd have to add multiple Author_ID columns to the Books table, one for each author. But how many do you add? 2? 3? 10? However many you choose, you'll probably end up with a lot of sparse rows where many of the Author_ID values are NULL and there's a good chance that you'll run across a case where you need "just one more." So then you're either constantly modifying the schema to try to accommodate or you're imposing some artificial restriction ("no book can have more than 3 authors") to force things to fit.
A true many-to-many relationship involving two tables is impossible to create in a relational database. I believe that is what they refer to when they say that it can't exist. In order to implement a many to many you need an intermediary table with basically 3 fields, an ID, an id attached to the first table and an id atached to the second table.
The reason for not wanting many-to-many relationships, is like you said they are incredibly inefficient and managing all the records tied to each side of the relationship can be tough, for instance if you delete a record on one side what happens to the records in the relational table and the table on the other side? Cascading deletes is a slippery slope, at least in my opinion.
Normally (pun intended) you would use a link table to establish many-to-many
Like described by Joe Stefanelli, let's say you had Authors and Books
SELECT * from Author
SELECT * from Books
you would create a JOIN table called AuthorBooks
Then,
SELECT *
FROM Author a
JOIN AuthorBooks ab
on a.AuthorId = ab.AuthorId
JOIN Books b
on ab.BookId = b.BookId
hope that helps.
it says that "many-to-many relationships can't exist in a relational database."
I suspect the author is just being controversial. Technically, in the SQL language, there is no means to explicitly declare a M-M relationship. It is an emergent result of declaring multiple 1-M relations to the table. However, it is a common approach to achieve the result of a M-M relationship and it is absolutely used frequently in databases designed on relational database management systems.
I haven't found a concrete reason (or better yet an example) that explains why to avoid the many-to-many relationship,
They should be used where they are appropriate to be used would be a more accurate way of saying this. There are times, such as the books and authors example given by Joe Stafanelli, where any other solution would be inefficient and introduce other data integrity problems. However, M-M relationships are more complicated to use. They add more work on the part of the GUI designer. Thus, they should only be used where it makes sense to use them. If you are highly confident that one entity should never be associated with more than one of some other entity, then by all means restrict it to a 1-M. For example, if you were tracking the status of a shipment, each shipment can have only a single status at any given time. It would over complicate the design and not make logical sense to allow a shipment to have multiple statuses.
Of course they can (and do) exist. That sounds to me like a soapbox statement. They are required for a great many business applications.
Done properly, they are not inefficient and do not have duplicate data either.
Take a look at FaceBook. How many many-to-many relationships exist between friends and friends of friends? That is a well-defined business need.
The statement that "many-to-many relationships can't exist in a relational database." is patently false.
Many-to-many relationships are in fact very useful, and also common. For example, consider a contact management system which allows you to put people in groups. One person can be in many groups, and each group can have many members.
Representation of these relations requires an extra table--perhaps that's what your book is really saying? In the example I just gave, you'd have a Person table (id, name, address etc) and a Group table (id, group name, etc). Neither contains information about who's in which group; to do that you have a third table (call it PersonGroup) in which each record contains a Person ID and a Group ID--that record represents the relation between the person and the group.
Need to find the members of a group? Your query might look like this (for the group with ID=1):
SELECT Person.firstName, Person.lastName
FROM Person JOIN PersonGroup JOIN Group
ON (PersonGroup.GroupID = 1 AND PersonGroup.PersonID = Person.ID);
It is correct. The Many to Many relationship is broken down into several One to Many relationships. So essentially, NO many to many relationship exists!
Well, of course M-M relationship does exist in relational databases and they also have capability of handling at some level through bridging tables, however as the degree of M-M relationship increases it also increases complexity which results in slow R-W cycles and latency.
It is recommended to avoid such complex M-M relationships in a Relational Database. Graph Databases are the best alternative and good at handling Many to Many relationship between objects and that's why social networking sites uses Graph databases for handling M-M relationship between User and Friends, Users and Events etc.
Let's invent a fictional relationship (many to many relationship) between books and sales table. Suppose you are buying books and for each book you buy needs to generate an invoice number for that book. Suppose also that the invoice number for a book can represent multiple sales to the same customer (not in reality but let's assume). We have a many to many relationship between books and sales entities.
Now if that's the case, how can we get information about only 1 book given that we have purchased 3 books since all books would in theory have the same invoice number? That introduces the main problem of using a many to many relationship I guess. Now if we add a bridging entity between Books and sales such that each book sold have only 1 invoice number, no matter how many books are purchases we can still correctly identify each books.
In a many-to-many relationship there is obvious redundancy as well as insert, update and delete anomaly which should be eliminated by converting it to 2 one-to-many relationship via a bridge table.
M:N relationships should not exist in database design. They are extremely inefficient and do not make for functional databases. Two tables (entities) with a many-to-many relationship (aircraft, airport; teacher, student) cannot both be children of each other, there would be no where to put foreign keys without an intersecting table. aircraft-> flight <- airport; teacher <- class -> student.
An intersection table provides a place for an entity that is dependent on two other tables, for example, a grade needs both a class and a student, a flight needs both an aircraft and an airport. Many-to-many relationships conceal data. Intersection tables reveal this data and create one-to-many relationships that can be more easily understood and worked with. So, the question arises, what table should the flight be in--aircraft or airport. Neither, they should be foreign keys in the intersection table, Flight.
I know, there is a lot of info on mysql out there. But I was not really able to find an answer to this specific and actually simple question:
Let's say I have two tables:
USERS
(with many fields, e.g. name, street, email, etc.) and
GROUPS
(also with many fields)
The relation is (I guess?) 1:n, that is ONE user can be a member of MANY groups.
What I dis, is create another table, named USERS_GROUPS_REL. This table has only two fields:
us_id (unique key of table USERS) and
gr_id (unique key of table GROUPS)
In PHP I do a query with join.
Is this "best practice" or is there a better way?
Thankful for any hint!
Hi all,
thanks for your quick and helpful support. Knowing that I was on the right way builds up my mysql-self-confidence a little. :-)
As many commented, my example is not 1:n but many to many. Just as a quick sql-lesson: :-)
Are these the right terms?
1:n one to many
n:1 many to one
n:n many to many?
You have described a many-to-many relationship. Using that relationship, many USERs can be members of many GROUPS. For your purposes, this is indeed the correct way to go.
One-to-many and one-to-one relationships do not require the link or cross-reference table (USERS_GROUPS_REL).
You might find this tutorial useful:
http://www.tonymarston.net/php-mysql/many-to-many.html
It's quite the best case :)
Creating a compound predicate primary key in the relation table is the optimal solution:
ALTER TABLE USERS_GROUPS_REL ADD PRIMARY KEY(us_id, gr_id)
That would be the best practice.
You have two tables on either side of the join and a mapping table (or linker table, or whatever other terminology is out there) in the middle which handles the Many-to-Many relationship (A Group has many Users and a User can belong to many Groups).
To increase performance, you should make a composite key for the mapping table out of us_id and gr_id. You can also create an index on the inverse so that if you need to sort by gr_id, you get the performance benefit there too.
One user can belong to many groups, and one group contains many users, so it is a many-to-many relationship.
The way you describe it is a typical and correct one. A many-to-many relationship is often mapped with an association class or relation table.
Sometimes the relation table has more columns. For example, a user may be the administrator of a particular group. The users_group_rel table would then also have a field administrator.