Question

Looking for some advice on how I might accomplish this MySQL task: I want to have a table with a list of orders (Table 1), but each order needs to have a list of a bunch of food items. So would I reference a different table in each row of Table 1 that holds these food items?

Table 1 –

customer: | reference to table | time placed | customer name|

etc…..

Answer 1

Here’s what your schema should look like:

orders: id | table_id | time | customer_name

items: id | name

order_items: id | order_id | item_id

An order can have multiple food items and one food item can belong to multiple orders. Typical case of many-many mapping.