Question

I’m not sure if I’m modeling this type of relationship correctly, perhaps someone could provide some insight into whether or not this is sound:

Say we have a typical parent-children type relationship where each one parent could have many children, but we need to keep track of the parent’s single (gasp) favorite child…

---

Table Parent

– FavoriteChildID

and

---

Table Child

– ParentID

so the links criss-cross, where one is a many to one, and the other is one to one. is this considered good design? Would it be better to have a column in the child table where only one row could be flagged a favorite at any time? Something else?

Thanks.

Answer 1

How about an additional table?

table favourite(
  ,parent_id
  ,child_id
  ,primary key(parent_id)
);

It would help if for all favourite-oriented queries.