Question

I am not necessarily looking for MySQL or PHP code. Rather I’m trying to get a concept of how to set everything up.

I want to create a database using MySQL (and using PHP to update it) of all the books my family owns. I want to set up different ‘bookshelves’ for each person in my family so we can see who has a certain book.

My first thought was to have a table for all the titles, authors, etc and have a field for user id to show who had the book. However, I might have a copy of Hunger Games and my grandmother might have a copy of Hunger Games. I want to be able to show it on both bookshelves. The only way my idea would work is if we had no duplicate books.

My next idea was to use a different table for each user and have a field that contains the book id for each book the user owns. I think this would work on a small scale but it does not seem like an efficient design. I am planning on making the database public for everyone in my town to use (thousands of people) once I get a stable website going so I want to start off with the right kind of design.

How should this be designed?

Answer 1

BOOK
--------
book_id
title
other_book_related_info

PERSON
-------
person_id
name
other_person_info

BOOK_PERSON
-------------
book_id
person_id
possibly-dates-when-this-person-owned-this-book