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Table Design - Best way to organise my tables

Hi,

I am building up a web database application that is essentially a content management system for users that are writing articles and reviews on diverse subjects. All articles and reviews share common data fields such as author, publishing date, etc, which lends itself well to an overall 'Articles' table. However, articles from different sections will have different content (i.e. a music album review will store links to the artists homepage, whereas a film review may have links to actor biographies, and links to various screenshot images). Therefore, each section needs a seperate table or group of tables layout.

Therefore, my question is how might I best link to these seperate types of tables from a common top-level 'Articles' table?

If, for example, I setup my Articles table to be:

Article ID
Author ID
Section ID - type of article (i.e. music review, film review, etc)
LinkID - I would like to use this field to link to the specific table for the Section type. I link to different types of tables, not a static link.

Can this be done? Or is there a better, or more common method for doing this?

Thanks for any help
salukibob

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todd_farmer

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salukibob

ASKER

Your updated method does make a lot more sense. Although currently there is no intention to have multiple authors, i can see a need for an article to be included in multiple sections. So thanks for that advice, I think thats definately a better route to go down.

cheers
salukibob

todd_farmer

Thanks for the points!