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Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 18
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Newbie Poster
Database Design Question I posted a similar question in MySQL section before but i think this one might be more general/easier to understand (hopefully):
I'm doing a database (in MySQL) of different plants which is gonna store various (somewhat detailed) information about them.
Here's a sample of two tables:
Families (Plant Family)
Genera (Plant Genus)
and then theres a Plants table which uses a few tables including the two above and has their pk's as foreign keys:
Now the data for this table is going to come from an excel spreadsheet file that pretty much has all the data needed except the id's because the
ssheet only has the names stored. Now to save time (there are 2300 records in the ssheet) i wanted to just save the file as CSV and import into
the db but then i would have to change from using family_id, genus_id, etc to using the actual name i.e family_name, etc. which i'm not sure
will work as good as using id's (which is possible but then i would need to modify the ssheet to add all the id's for each column) and i'm not
sure if the relationship would hold as well since it would not really be a foreign key as, say, family_id is the key not family_name (although
in families table it has unique values)
So anyone has any ideas, suggestions, support, etc?
Thanks in advance...
I'm doing a database (in MySQL) of different plants which is gonna store various (somewhat detailed) information about them.
Here's a sample of two tables:
Families (Plant Family)
family_id int(10) family_name varchar(50)
Genera (Plant Genus)
genus_id int(10) genus_name varchar(50)
and then theres a Plants table which uses a few tables including the two above and has their pk's as foreign keys:
plant_id int(10) family_id int(10) families -> family_id genus_id int(10) genera -> genus_id species_id int(10) species -> species_id auth1 varchar(100) ...
Now the data for this table is going to come from an excel spreadsheet file that pretty much has all the data needed except the id's because the
ssheet only has the names stored. Now to save time (there are 2300 records in the ssheet) i wanted to just save the file as CSV and import into
the db but then i would have to change from using family_id, genus_id, etc to using the actual name i.e family_name, etc. which i'm not sure
will work as good as using id's (which is possible but then i would need to modify the ssheet to add all the id's for each column) and i'm not
sure if the relationship would hold as well since it would not really be a foreign key as, say, family_id is the key not family_name (although
in families table it has unique values)
So anyone has any ideas, suggestions, support, etc?
Thanks in advance...
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Budapest
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Posting Whiz in Training
what do you need exactly ?
Do a favour, leave me alone
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 18
Reputation:
Rep Power: 5
Solved Threads: 0
Newbie Poster
oh sorry well i actually got that sorted out on my own, but i basically wanted to know if i should have stored the names as well as the id's in the same table but i ended up just storing the id's and using a join to get the names
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