[AccessD] Re: Normalizing issue

I think I've decided on a simple "people" table -- with a mtm related table
that describes their role in any publication. Seems to make the most sense
at this point. 

Susan H. 

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.


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