It sounds like an underspecification to me, where the database design was done with the assumption that each "book" record just needs a pointer to one "author" record.
One approach is to have three tables: books, authors, and book-author links (where each book can be linked to multiple authors, and multiple books to the same author or authors).
Another would be to have an "author" record which represented a collaboration, and that itself linked to multiple authors.
(I'm not a database designer, but I did take a DB design class in college, and do some relational DB stuff now and then.)
no subject
It sounds like an underspecification to me, where the database design was done with the assumption that each "book" record just needs a pointer to one "author" record.
One approach is to have three tables: books, authors, and book-author links (where each book can be linked to multiple authors, and multiple books to the same author or authors).
Another would be to have an "author" record which represented a collaboration, and that itself linked to multiple authors.
(I'm not a database designer, but I did take a DB design class in college, and do some relational DB stuff now and then.)