Database Design Question

[ray_broome]

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)

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...

what do you need exactly ?

[ray_broome]

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