Multiple Primary Keys?

[Anon]

I am creating a database table to track books and their authors. What is the best way to approach allowing the entry of multiple authors of a book without duplicating data?

For example, if I create a single authors table and then want to use the authors found in that table in a titles table....what is the best way to allow multiple fields in the titles table to input the authors when there is more than one author of a book?

Can I simply create several fields bound to the authors table, or is there a better way?

Thanks for the help.

[gushy]

I would have a seperate authors table with an id number field. That way you could set it up to have up to X authors/columns and only have one author column in your titles table which will have a numeric reference in it.

There may be a better way, but that's the approach I would take.

-- Nick.

[[deleted]]

I'd normalize it a bit more:

create one table that holds the books,
create on table that holds all the authors, one author per record.
create one table that holds the info about which authors belong to which books.

That's a big join, but you don't replicate any data and you can get overviews of which authors belong to a book, which books belong to an author, but also which authors have worked together on the same book.