Question

I’ve put together a simple database for storing information on awards and nominations. I’ve tried to remove as much data redundancy as possible. Here’s how it’s presently looking:

The reason for the Nominated table is that I realised that one nomination would have many nominees. For example, the award Best Screenplay could go to Ken Levine and David Isaacs or Woody Allen or Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow.

Note: Award.name is the name of the award, e.g. Best Actor.

Thanks for pointing out any possible improvements.

Answer 1

Minor notes

1. I prefer singular for table and column names so Nominees becomes Nominee, Awards becomes Award, etc.

2. Renaming the Award table as AwardCategory as @wildplasser suggested in comments.

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Major notees

As @Olivier points out, the m::n relationships intermediate tables, like the Nominated one, will have a UNIQUE constraint on the compound (NomineeId, NominationId) . So, it’s better to drop the auto generated (surrogate) key and make the compound key the PRIMARY KEY. This is the natural key of the relation and there are several advantages of using it as the Primary Key. The surrogate key serves no purpose at all in this case except for having wider row and one more useless index. The two parts of the natural keys will be used for joining anyway.

The same thing applies for the Nomination table! The compound (FilmId, AwardCategoryId, EventId) will be a UNIQUE key, to ensure that no film gets 2 nominations for the same award category for the same event, so it’s again better to drop the surrogate key and make this compound the primary key. Rethinking, we may have 2 nominations for the same AwardCategory for the same Film, say for two 'Best Supporting Actor' so we add a NominatioNo in the Primary Key (this can be handy later if we want to restrict the nominations for a certain category or for all to say the constant 5).

Now, the (funny and interesting) thing is that the Nominated table has to be re-examined and have a compound (NomineedId, FilmId, AwardCategoryId, EventId) Primary Key – and just these 4 columns as attributes.

I’m not sure of what exactly the Event and Ceremony table are meant to store, but lets assume that the Ceremony table is meant to store information about different ceremonies (e.g. 'Oscar Awards', 'Strawberry Awards') and the Event table is to store information about a year’s ceremony (e.g. ('Oscar', 2011), ('Oscar', 2012), ('Starwberry Awards', 2012)). So i’ll move the Year to the Event table and make the (CeremonyId, EventYear) the Priamry Key of Event. (I could very well be wrong this, you know your data better.).

So, the Nomination.EventId is replaced by CeremonyId and EventYear and the Primary Keys of both Nomination and Nominated get even longer! (that’s one drawback of using natural keys as Primary Keys). Lets see what we’ve got so far:

Database Design 1 http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/9592/oscarw.png

You can easily add a NominationWinner (as a table with 1:1 relationship to Nomination) to store which nomination won which category (a Unique constraint on (CeremonyId, EventYear, AwardCategoryId) would enforce that). The design would be like this:

Database Design 1 http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2108/oscar3x.png

Having so complex primary keys may look clumsy but it helps when joining tables. Imagine you want to find all Winners for the ‘Strawberry Awards’ for the 50s and 60s and only for the ‘Actresses’ categories and also show for what film the award was for. You don’t have to join all intermediate tables. Instead, you can retrive data using only the NominationWinner, Nominee, Ceremony, Film and AwardCategory tables (and using only the Nominated intermediate table):

SELECT ne.Name                AS Winner
     , wi.EventYear           AS Year
     , aw.AwardCategoryTitle  AS Category
     , fm.Title               AS FilmTitle
FROM
      NominationWinner AS wi
  JOIN 
      Ceremony AS ce
          ON ce.CeremonyId = wi.CeremonyId 
  JOIN
      AwardCategory AS aw
          ON aw.AwardCategoryId = wi.AwardCategoryId 
  JOIN
      Film AS fm
          ON fm.FilmId = wi.FilmId 
  JOIN
      Nominated nd
          ON  nd.CeremonyId    = wi.CeremonyId 
          AND nd.EventYear     = wi.EventYear 
          AND nd.AwardCategory = wi.AwardCategory 
          AND nd.NominationNo  = wi.NominationNo 
          AND nd.FilmId        = wi.FilmId  
  JOIN
      Nominee AS ne
          ON ne.NomineeId = nd.NomineeId 
WHERE 
      ce.CeremonyTitle = 'Strawberry Awards'
  AND wi.EventYear BETWEEN 1950 AND 1969
  AND aw.AwardCategoryTitle LIKE '%Actress%'