Re: approaching a relational database

Gotcha. thanks to everyone for the advice. I'm going to switch it to the 2 table format. Thanks again, Doug David Eisenhart wrote:

I would go along the lines that Stas suggests. You appear to have a two table database here: Table1: tblHole hole_id, hole_no, course_id, par, WH, MH, Trees1, Trees2, Trees3 etc...

-------   --------   ----------  ----  ---- ----    -----     -------  -----
1               1                 1
2               2                 1
3               3                 1

... ..

18             18               1
19              1                2
20              2                2
21              3                2

(Note the course_id field above acting as the foreign key to the table tblCourse) (You could make the hole_no, course_id pair of fields a unique index - afterall there should never be more than one entry for each hole_no, course_id pair) Table2: tblCourse: Course_id Course_Name State County

----------    --------------   -----   -------
1                      xyz
2                      abc

... ...

10                    yyy

(The use of course_id in your description below is good (you are thinking along the correct lines by introducing the foreign key field that references the course table) However, if I understand it correctly you are proposing to have a separate table for each hole attribute (1 table for par, 1 table for WH etc.. etc..) which is messy and unnecessary.) Good luck David Eisenhart "Doug Parker" <drparker@clam.rutgers.edu> wrote in message news:3DFDE875.E63CA03@clam.rutgers.edu...

The grid for each course looks like this (excluding CourseName, State,

County,

Street, City, State)

           Hole1 | Hole2 | Hole 3 | ......... | Hole18
Par          9          4            7     ..........       6
WH         8          4            4     ..........       5
MH         5          4            4     ..........       5
Tees1      4          4            3     ..........       5
Tees2      3          3            2    ..........        5
Tees3     etc...

Tees4 Tees5 For every course, I have to enter in all of these variables. It isn't

really

keeping score, it's just a table of all the information for a given

course -

par, wh (women's handicap), mh, etc. What i did was pretty much make a

table

for every row. Each table (par, for example) has a course_id that I set

in the

courses table (that holds the CourseName, State, County, Street, City,

State),

and then 18 more fields - one for each hole. So it looks like: "par" table

           course_id | Hole1 | Hole2 | Hole 3 | ......... | Hole18
                165         4          4            5     ..........

3

Is that alright? it was the most reasonable thing I could think of, but

i'm

not too experienced in database design, so i figured i'd ask. Thanks, Doug