Question

I have a table that must reference another record, but of the same table. Here’s an example:

Customer
********
ID
ManagerID (the ID of another customer)
...

I have a bad feeling about doing this. My other idea was to just have a separate table that just stored the relationship.

CustomerRelationship
***************
ID
CustomerID
ManagerID

I feel I may be over complicating such a trivial thing however, I would like to get some idea’s on the best approach for this particular scenario?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Why do you have a “bad feeling” about this? It’s perfectly acceptable for a table to reference its own primary key. Introducing a secondary table only increases the complexity of your queries and negatively impacts performance.