[thelist] Newbie - DB Design Help

[Rob Smith]

Bordering on beating a dead horse with an ugly stick, the "bid" field in
my original M:M relationship, as isolated and unnecessary as it may
seem, it does allow a certain level of referential integrity especially
if it's an auto increment field of some sort. You'll never or should
rather ever get corrupted tables nor allow duplicate data to be entered.
We're teetering on wither bridge tables should be in 4NF or not. There
could, not that there would, be a class with no students... Tardy hall
comes to mind or detention. Or in my case, there could be a department
with no products that simply exists as an informational outlet with a
link to the vendor. If that could be the case, it could violate 4NF. 

Every table must have some primary key associated with it...comes in
handy when you want to do full-text searching, indexing, hashing, SQL's
containstable if you want to build your own search engine. Anyway.. back
to work.

Rob Smith
LexJet
rob.smith at lexjet.com
http://www.lexjet.com
(800)453-9538
(941)330-1210 Int'l
(941)330-1220 Fax
1680 Fruitville Road, 3rd Floor
Sarasota, FL 34236