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.)
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mmmag
no subject
Date: 2008-10-22 06:18 pm (UTC)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.)