Re: Database Design + Parts Explosion
Posted by: anodynepres
Date: May 11, 2007 07:52AM

I find data hierarchies challenging all the time. What you might want to consider is thinking about your data a little differently. The one characteristic that helps give me a clue that I might want to change the structure of my data is that in this case you have at least one PART that is different from the rest because it has no parent. This would suggest that we really have two types of entities in our table, parent parts and child parts (some may be both).

If we were to remove the PARENT_ID field from the table, though, all we would have is parts. What we could do then is create a new table to represent just the parent/child relationship:

Table PART_LINK
parent_id
child_id

I think this approach would give you the flexibility you need to display your parts as needed. Parent parts can have any number of children and child parts can be children of multiple parents.

Good Luck!

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Re: Database Design + Parts Explosion
May 11, 2007 07:52AM


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