Question

I’ve been trying to figure out how to create links between different tables and am having no luck at cracking the mystery. The more I learn the more I question what questions I should be asking. I made some table diagrams to show what I’m trying to achieve…

I have a shirts table which looks like this:

Notice in the columns labeled “qp_price” and “o_price” I have text instead of prices, that’s because I want to connect it to this table:

The values of the “qp_price” and “o_price” are equal to one of the values in the “price_cat” column in the price table. This is my way of trying to simplify price management in the future. In the shirts table you’ll see there are repeated values which is because they cost the same price, besides just the men’s shirts there will be women’s crewnecks, boys, girls and babies. I want to link them into a new shirts table where it results like this:

I was also wondering about indexes and if it would be better to create this as an index:

then inject it into the shirts_master table however you do it and add the “clr_options” and “qty” columns on to the shirts_master table. I want it organized with the two different prices because I have two types of custom services that will call to the appropriate column. In the end I still want the shirts and price tables individual, just linked onto another table so I can update them and have it automatically read it in the master table through the link. What would be the smartest way to put this together?

Answer 1

Not really sure what you want to do, but you can get your shirts_master with a simple join

select s.shirt_id, s.shirt_name, s.shirt_type, s.shirt_size,
       qp.price as qp_price, o.price as o_price, s.clr_options, s.qty
from shirts s
join price_list qp on qp.price_cat = s.qp_price
join price_list o on o.price_cat = s.o_price;

If you want this as a view, you can create it with

create view shirts_master as
select s.shirt_id, s.shirt_name, s.shirt_type, s.shirt_size,
       qp.price as qp_price, o.price as o_price, s.clr_options, s.qty
from shirts s
join price_list qp on qp.price_cat = s.qp_price
join price_list o on o.price_cat = s.o_price;