Hi,
I am developing a database for someone who deals with holiday home rentals. He wants a website that will display a calender of each holiday homes availability. The call centre staff will use a backend system to book the holiday home and all this will be running from a MySQL server.

Can anyone tell me how to structure the bookings/dates tables so I can display an entire month highlighting in some way the dates that are unavailable?

thanks

I would suggest that you need the following tables (it's not complete, but you can extend it on your own):

home:
id (primary key)
short_name
description

calendar:
start_date
end_date
home_id (foreign key)
customer_id(foreign key)

customer:
c_id (primary key)
firstname
lastname
street
zip
town
country
telephone
fax
email

In your insert-queries you have to ensure the start or end_date is between in an existing duration for that accomodation

in a select-statement you get the duration of someone's vacation and you mark these days red...

I hope you can get my idea...