Working on a hobby project, have 0 database design experience, and trying to wrap my head around how to model the following.
I have an appointments, users, and tutors table.
Each appointment will have 1 user and 1 tutor.
In this situation can I use a one-to-many relationship where I link one appointment to one user and one tutor.
Or does it make more sense to make the appointment table the many-to-many third table, which takes a user and a tutor?
I feel like it should probably be many-to-many, but a second opinion would be great based on my lack of experiance
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)
Hello I have the following situation:
I have a product instance table that is nothing more than a product already assigned to a department and employee.
Well, but I have the following business logic: the product can be an equipment, or a component, that is, a product can have children.
thinking how a computer case is a device that has patrimony_code, and has child products (components) such as:
motherboard,
memoirs,
vga
etc etc
and all of these components are connected to the equipment.
I arrived at this with less table:
But I encountered some problems:
my components would not need departament_id, as they do not belong to the department but to the equipment that there belongs to the department.
So I came to this modeling, but I don't know if it is a good thing to do this relationship, could someone help me if there is a more clean / solid solution for this?
if I have understood your description correctly, only a piece of equipment can be assigned directly to a department, not the individual components that make up the piece of equipment?
Assuming this is the case then I suggest you split this problem into 2 separate tasks as they are, in reality, unrelated and trying to treat them as a single model is causing confusion:
Model the relationship between an instance of a piece of equipment and a department
Model the hierarchy of components (and their instances) that make up a piece of equipment
Once you have these two models you can then relate them if you need to but logically they are separate and you can change one without affecting the other
Hope this helps?
UPDATE 1
(in response to your questions)
You construct 1 sub-model that covers your Equipment entity and the Component entity (plus any other relevant entities) that describe how your products are modelled.
Your construct a second sub-model that describes how equipment is assigned to a department.
The only entity that would be (necessarily) common to the 2 sub-models is the Equipment entity; though, obviously, you can display both sub-models on the same diagram if that is required - even though they are logically separate (apart from the one common entity: Equipment)
Second year CS student here.
Questions:
Is the 'Results' Table currently creating a 'common look-up table'?
How do I solve Employment-student relationship?
Database problem:
For each student they would like to know which degree program they were on (a student may have studies for more than one degree but not at the same time); the modules they took and their final results. For their employment they would like to know the type of employment (Full Time or Part Time, Permanent or Fixed Term, Continued Education, Taking gap year); their job title and whether it is considered a ‘Graduate’ role; The name and address of the employer; a contact email for the student, whether we can use that information for publicity purposes and a brief description of their role.
My current design for Database:
Current ERD
Q1.
I noticed when constructing the ERD there was a ternary relationship between Module, Degree and Student and decided to solve this many to many problem by creating a fourth table called results. It has foreign keys from Module, Degree and Student and contains the Result date and Result score for a student in a module on a degree. Considering each student takes several modules there will be a lot of entries, will 'Results' form a common look up table? I heard these were not best practise when constructing a DB. This design also makes it difficult to query which degrees each student has done (each student can take many degrees just not at the same time). I considered creating separate tables for the Student-Module relationship and Student-Degree relationship however you then would not know which module was taken under which degree.
Q2.
I was given this advice by my lecturer:
The relationship between employment and students it not quite clear and would require some explanation. Typically an employment in the real world is between 1 employer and 1 employee only, not multiple employees per employment.
Student-Employment Relationship
Is this a suitable fix? I currently have a foreign key in student which relates to their employment. Am i still able to use this or am i thinking about this relationship all wrong?
The database should support the following queries:
For a particular student their employment details
Details of students for which they do not have Employment records
Details of students who were unintentionally unemployed within 6 months of their graduation
% of students employed within one year of graduating according to class of degree
% of students in a graduate role for a particular year and degree program
All answers are greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.
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.