Hi,
I'm kinda new to this whole database thing, so I have a pretty simple question...

I'm making a database that stores a bunch of books and information about them. I have a table for books, and a table for authors. So there is an author_id field in the books table which says which author wrote which book. But now I have a book that has multiple authors...how do I deal with that? Is there some way to have a list in of author_ids in a row? Is there a data type that will let me do this easily? The only other solution I can think of is to have a different table for every book with multiple authors, but that's obvisouly not something you want to do. Anyway, I would love some help. Thanks a lot.

-numLocked

Three tables.

One table for books, that contains only information about the book itself.

One table for authors, with one row for every author that has ever written any part of a book you are tracking.

One table for "linkage" between them, linking a book to an author. This is also where you'd keep the "linkage specific" information such as Forward only, primary author, second, third, research assistant, etc.

-PatP

ah! of course! i knew there was a wimple answer. thanks a lot