[AccessD] Re: Normalizing issue

Or, you could add a table for related parties and carry their role in that 
table.  Then you can get all the co-authors and illustrators, reviewers, etc.

tblPublicationRelatedParty
PublicationRelatedPartyID
PublicationID
PartyID
RoleID


At 12:00 PM 6/26/2005, you wrote:
>Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 12:45:21 -0400
>From: "Susan Harkins" <ssharkins at bellsouth.net>
>Subject: RE: [AccessD] Normalizing issue
>To: "'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'"
>         <accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
>Message-ID: <20050626164526.WJSK8050.ibm62aec.bellsouth.net at SUSANONE>
>Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"
>
>
>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.