Normalisation

[NicM]

Hi

I'm starting to write a very basic news publishing system with PHP and MySQL and have established that I need to store the following information:

Table name: Authors
username (pk)
password
authority

Table name: Articles
article_id (pk)
title
content
timestamp
expirydate
author (fk referencing username in authors table)

However, I'm aware that with this structure, there will be redundancy in the author column of the articles table since authors will be writing more than one article. Can anyone help me to eliminate this redundancy and achieve second normal form with this database?

Thanks!
Nicola

[trooper]

Create another table and have the following structure

TABLE news_item

ID (pk)
Article_ID (FK)
Author_ID(FK)

Then u can remove the author FK from the article table. By creating the extra table you are also allowing the tables to be read faster as you are using the existing tables PK's as the FK in the new table.

Originally posted by NicM
Hi

I'm starting to write a very basic news publishing system with PHP and MySQL and have established that I need to store the following information:

Table name: Authors
username (pk)
password
authority

Table name: Articles
article_id (pk)
title
content
timestamp
expirydate
author (fk referencing username in authors table)

However, I'm aware that with this structure, there will be redundancy in the author column of the articles table since authors will be writing more than one article. Can anyone help me to eliminate this redundancy and achieve second normal form with this database?

Thanks!
Nicola

[NicM]

OK, that's great thank you.

Nicola

[jjoske]

There is no need to creating a linking table, unless their is more than one author contributing to each article.