[AccessD] Normalizing issue

Next, you have the issue of multiple authors on a single book or article.

=======For the purposes of this database, this won't be an issue. We're
simply tracking the works of individual authors -- not the authors for
individual works. But, if it comes up later, I won't have a problem revising
it. 

You may have to distinguish the principal author from the others. Finally,
let's take a case from my own sordid past in which I worked as part of a
team on a book about an O-O language. I wrote three of the approximately 20
chapters, and had no part in the writing of anything else in the book.
Should those 3 instances be regarded as "articles"? In a way they are closer
to articles than to authorship of the entire book.

===========For the purposes of this db, that won't be an issue either --
ditto above. There wouldn't be a record for an et. Al -- if an author wanted
us to track a book they had contributed to, they would have to list the
book's author, as published. Right now, we're not tracking that sort of
thing, but it could come up later. What you did just push though, is the
difference between writer and illustrator -- many of these people are
illustrators and I haven't even allowed for that. <groan>

Finally, the problem with using a pair of tables (Books and Mags) is that
before you're done, a third medium will emerge (DVDs, say), and that will
mean that you need to add a table at minimum. In light of this, my
preference would be to create a table PublicationTypes, containing these
three entries to start, and then have a single table containing the facts
about the publications, and finally an Authors table containing the names of
the authors of the various publications, perhaps also with a flag denoting
"Principal author". This would enable "SQL: Access to SQL Server" to have
either two principal authors or none, in addition to any number of ancillary
authors.

============Me too -- that is exactly what I've done because I've already
added a third type already: books, periodicals, and online. You're
absolutely right on this one. In the long run, I'd rather deal with the Null
fields than compound all the queries, etc. with multiple tables.  

Susan H.