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Asked: 2026-06-17T20:55:44+00:00

I have taken on the project of creating a relation database which will contains

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I have taken on the project of creating a relation database which will contains all the basic ingredients we use in modern cooking. As you could imagine, there are going to be thousands of items. I do not have much sql experience so I am having trouble arriving at a seemingly efficient way of storing the ingredients.
If you go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_food_preparation#General_ingredients you can see the list I am currently trying to put into my database.

My database current has a table for every main and sub category of food ex. a table for cereals and a different table for wheat. At first it seemed okay to do this, but then i realized that there are going to be dozens more sub categories. For each item in that wiki list there are more tables and more tables that I must create. I feel like this plethora of tables will make my project very inefficient. Is there a better way to create my database? Or am I on the right track? Here is an example of the columns in my tables: 

    id INT(11),name VARCHAR(45),parent INT(11),img VARCHAR(45),desc VARCHAR(45)

parent INT(11) will be a foreign key to whatever the parent table is, so I figured they will all connect this way.
Any advice is appreciated! ~THANKS

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  1. Editorial Team

    I would first not recommend storing all these in separate tables — it’ll drive you crazy 🙂

    Instead however, I think you have 2 options.

    Option 1 (Adjacency List Model) — Consider using a single Foods table, with FoodId, FoodName, ParentFoodId, AnyOtherAttributes you wish to store. This is easiest to store the data, but can be a little more troublesome to return your results as you’ll need to join on the same table multiple times to return levels.

    Option 2 (Nested Set Model) — This option still would have the single Foods table, but instead of having a ParentFoodId, you’ld have 2 columns, left_index and right_index. This is perhaps a little more complicated to understand at first, but can be easier to query if you have several unknown nested parent-to-child relationships.

    Take a look at this article for some further explanations:

    http://mikehillyer.com/articles/managing-hierarchical-data-in-mysql/

    Good luck.

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