Question

As this question is sure to reveal, I’m relatively new to database design. Please pardon my lack of understanding.

I want to store values like the following (example from Google calendar) in a database:

What’s the best way to do this? Would this be one database field or several?

If the former, does this disobey normalization rules?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I suggest you to create a relation many-many, you can achive that separating the columns in more logical way (normalization) … for the example above:

You should have a table called “schedules”(or whatever make sense to you), another something like “repeat_on” and a third table called “days”(here you have monday-sunday with their IDs). In the table of the middle(repeat_on) you should create foreign keys(for the other 2 tables: schedule_id and day_id) to do the magic.

This way you can combine whatever you want, for example:

schedule    day
 1           1
 1           3
 1           7

Meaning that you have to do the same on monday, wednesday and sunday.