Hi Everyone,

Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

I am wondering what the best way to setup the following database would be.

Say, for example, I wanted to index all the grocery stores in the neighborhood. And then, I wanted to sort them by what variations of different items they sell. For example, I would have one table to handle all the different grocery stores:

ID | Store Name | Location
1 | Max's Food Mart | 123 Main Street
2 | Food Time| 444 Bacon Street

Now, the goal here is to take a list of different foods that each store sells, but each type of food has certain filters. For example.

Bread can either be Wheat or White.
Cereal can either be Lucky Charms or Cap'n Crunch

The Bread and Cereal would be categories, and the options behind them would be the filters for those categories. So, for example, I could input the data for Max's Food Mart saying whether or not they carry Bread, and then whether or not it comes in white or wheat.

What would be the best way to setup these Categories? Would each category get its own table with the different Filters being the fields? Or would there be a Categories Table and a Filters table?

Please, any advice would be highly appreciated.

Thanks!

have a gander at Paul Litwin's tome on Rudy's (R937) site. thats always a good beginning in my books

I'm wondering if this zipped up acccess database might help you

The guy is not using Access Database

Even if he's not - the concept is pretty similar; which is why I uploaded it.
It's a small data model of how to link items to types. If you'd open it and look at the design you'd see that too