Question

After doing some research I need some advice. This is a small project which allows teachers to post assignments online, and students to view/submit those assignments.

Students can have multiple courses assigned to them, so my question is: What is the best way to set up a table?

Example 1:

student         courses

John Smith      Math, Chemistry, English
Mary White      Math, Biology

Example 2:

course          students

Math            John Smith, Mary White
Biology         Mary White
Chemistry       John Smith
English         John Smith

I apologize in advance if this is a noobie question, but I want to avoid doing things wrong from the get-go and I’m open to any and all suggestions!

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

It’s generally not suitable to put more than one item in a column in a relational database. So create a table like this:

course          student

Math            John Smith
Math            Mary White
Biology         Mary White
Chemistry       John Smith
English         John Smith

Then, you can use this table in JOIN expressions to retrieve the info you want. You may want to have additional tables that describe the essential information about courses and students. Something like:

course          instructor          time

Math            Albert Einstein     10:30

and

student         id_number           phone

John Smith      1234-5678           555-1212

…or whatever information you need to keep about courses and students.