Question

I am not really experienced with databases but I have a little problem. I am trying to create a database that stores the courses being taken by students and lecturers so I created three tables. In the lecturer and student tables, the field courses represent a comma separated list of the courses taken by either the lecturer or the student.

Something like this:

Lecturer – Courses – "1,2"

Student – Courses – "1,2,3"

Courses – 1 – "Bio"

The problem however is that when I want to show a list of student based on their courses, I have to search all the students and the courses and search again to check whether the csv list has the specified course (which seems a bit redundant). Is there another way I can achieve this goal, say by relating/referencing the indexes or something? Thanks

Answer 1

Create two new tables:

student_courses(int student_id, int course_id)
lecturer_courses(int lecturer_id, int course_id)

You can now create individual rows for each course a student is taking and each course a lecturer is teaching, assuming that you want to track delivery of a course separate from taking the course. You can then write queries against those tables using course id when you want to do course related analysis.