Your structure is going to be a lot like a message board:
Message Board-> Topic->Reply->Reply->...
Where you can reply to someone else's reply or reply to the main topic.

Your setup would have two tables, a "category" table and a "product" table. You get your cascade by each category having a field to indicate the parent category. If the field is NULL or ) or something you decide, then you've it a "main" category. The "final" subcategory then has the product id field populate which links to the product table.

ProductCategories
--------------------------
RecordID
ParentID (contains the RecordID of another record)
ProductID

Products
------------
ProductID
Product

Categories
---------------
CategoryID
Category

This structure will give you unlimited levels, although it will be harder to query since you have to traverse the tree to get all your information. It ends up being about 1 query for each sublevel. You can do it in one query with joins and table aliases, but that gets limiting as your levels grow.


On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 12:43 PM, Walter D. Funk wrote:

I need to design a database, under a hierarchical structure. This Mysql
database aims to store a catalog
in which I should be able to define:

CATEGORIES -> SubCategories -> Sub-SubCategories -> Product


--
Brent Baisley
Systems Architect
Landover Associates, Inc.
Search & Advisory Services for Advanced Technology Environments
p: 212.759.6400/800.759.0577


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