Normal Topic Many 2 Many structure with Natural Links (Read 668 times)
Bob_Hansen
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Many 2 Many structure with Natural Links
Jun 25th, 2004 at 5:31am
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I am wondering if anyone has come up with a good method of uisng the Natural Linking to set up a Many-To-Many relationship.

One database contains Suppliers
One database contains Components

Any one Supplier may be the source of many Components.
This would be easy with Components as a sub to Suppliers.

Any Component may be provided by multiple Suppliers.
This would be easy with Suppliers as a sub to Components.

With a Relational structure I would make a database that contained a combination of the Supplier-ID and the Component-ID, and use that as the common Relational link.

Is that the correct solution here?  Make a database of both IDs, and have 2 subs: Suppliers and Components.

All thoughts and warnings are welcome.  Thanks.

  



Bob Hansen
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Hammer
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Re: Many 2 Many structure with Natural Links
Reply #1 - Jun 25th, 2004 at 10:36am
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Natural Linking is not a good choice for many-to-many. With Natural Liinking, any record can have only one parent record. For situations where the same child record must appear under multiple parents, you need to use relational links. If you use Natural linking, you would need to put a copy of each component record under each Supplier.
  

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Bob_Hansen
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Re: Many 2 Many structure with Natural Links
Reply #2 - Jun 25th, 2004 at 12:12pm
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Thanks Erika.......somehow I knew you were going to say that.  Roll Eyes  I could not see a solution with Naturals, but was hoping I was wrong.

You finally have me thinking Natural links vs. Relational (it's been a tough transition).  I do see the speed differences in Sesame, so I would prefer to stay with the Naturals.  Grin

Guess I will have to try a little harder for a sensible solution.  I suspect I will end up using a combination of Natural links and LU statements.  ???
  



Bob Hansen
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Sensible Solutions Inc.
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603-898-8223
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