Casey, I would consider, on the most basic level, a method like this:
Contacts (all the company contact info, etc) using primary key contact_id -> IndustrialRelationships table <- industry_id primary key on Industries table (all the different type of industries) So, in the IndustrialRelationships table, it's simply two columns... the contact_id for the contact, and the industry_id for the industry. Thus, you can put an arbitrary number of industries associated to a single contact. Then, later on, you can use this data to determine how many contacts you have for a given industry. To get the data back out, you could use a JOIN perhaps. This is very simple, but it should get you pointed in the right direction. I might suggest getting a book about or reading some pages regarding data modeling for more information on normalization. -- R. Deuce > I have a small table that contains company contact information: > > Table: Contacts > Key > Name > Address > Phone > Email > Website > etc.. > > > What I need to do is associate the type of industry the business servers > from a list of about 40 industries... My initial thinking was to create > another table that contains all of the industries along with unique key for > each. So table would look like > > Table: Industries > Industry > Key > > The problem is, some businesses server many different industries. So my > question is, can I add another column to the contacts table that would > associate many different industry key's to the contact? What is the best > way to design this database to talk with PHP? > > Thanks, > Casey DeBerry > -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
