Hi Everyone
This is my first post here. I am just planning my first serious DB and I am stuck and don't really even know what keywords to search for to solve my problem. Please help me model this.

I suppose if we had an ice cream store we could model a flavour table and a container table. If you had vanilla ice cream from the flavour table you could choose plain cone, flavoured cone or cup from the container table. In this case the options that accompany vanilla are finite and known, in this case 3.

What I can't figure out is a good way to model this if the options to the original product do not have a consistent value. I sell laboratory instrumentation and I would like to offer parts as well as the instrument itself. In some cases there might only be 3 additional parts to offer but in other case it might be close to 100. In our ice cream DB we knew we could get by with four columns ID, plain cone, flavoured cone and cup. If I don't know how many parts will be offered with a given instrument do I need to create the maximum number of columns? If I only offer 3 parts with one instrument do I need to have 97 empty columns if I want to have another instrument with 100 parts?

Thanks for reading my long post-Patrick