Question

I have question about normalization.
Suppose I have an applications dealing with songs.

First I thought about doing like this:

Songs Table:
id | song_title | album_id | publisher_id | artist_id

Albums Table:
id | album_title | etc...

Publishers Table:
id | publisher_name | etc...

Artists Tale:
id | artist_name | etc...

Then as I think about normalization stuff. I thought I should get rid of “album_id, publisher_id, and artist_id in songs table and put them in intermediate tables like this.

Table song_album:
song_id, album_id

Table song_publisher
song_id, publisher_id

Table song_artist
song_id, artist_id

Now I can’t decide which is the better way. I’m not an expert on database design so If someone would point out the right direction. It would awesome.

Are there any performance issues between two approaches?

Thanks

Answer 1

Forget about performance issues. The question is Does this model represent the data correctly?

The intermediate tables are called “junction tables” and they are useful when you can have a many-to-many relationship. For example, if you store the song “We Are the World” in your database, then you are going to have many artists for that song. Each of those artists are also responsible for creating many other songs. Therefor, to represent the data correctly, you will have to use junction tables, just as you did in the second version.