database design

[Ben Vaughan]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to database design and was looking for a solution to a problem i've encountered. Ok so i'm designing an application that has users and they tell us what types of drinks they like.

So each user clicks on checkboxs on a web form next to the drinks they like, coke, water, whiskey, etc. Now i'm not sure how to store this data.

I have a list of all the different types of drinks and I have a list of users. In the future I may want to add new drinks to the list (eg. a new softdrink comes on the market). I think it would be bad to have one field in a users table for each drink type and then put true/false in it as this seems like a waste of data space and if I add more drinks I need to add extra fields to my users table, which doesn't seem good.

The only other approach I can think of is to have a separate table with a column for each drink and one for a user id. Each row would be a user and have their drink preferences in it. Again the need to add extra drink types later on would require adding extra fields to this table, which just seems like poor design.

If anyone has any ideas on how I can better achieve this I would really appreciate your input.

Thanks,
Ben.