Hello,

I'm trying to figure out the best table design for a book database I'm
building, and there are a few things I'm not sure about. You can see a
picture of what I've come up with so far by following this link:
http://w1.894.telia.com/~u89404581/tabledesign.gif

I'll just list the things I'm not sure about:

1. Should PublicationMonth and PublicationYear be separate, or could you
combine them and use a date datatype? I'm not sure if the date datatype can
be used with only month and year. Maybe the months and years could even be
in separate tables. The month table could have a MonthID and a MonthName.
What do you think?

2.I'm not sure what to do about the imprints and publishers. A publisher can
have several imprints, but small ones may not have any imprints at all. So a
book edition can be of an imprint that belongs to a specific publisher, or
it may only have a publisher and no imprint. Any thoughts about how to best
do this would be welcome.

3. A topic can have several subtopics, and those can also have subtopics.
How would I implement this? Having tables for Topics, SubTopics, and
SubSubTopics doesn't seem very appealing. When doing searches I just want to
be able to search for a topic and not worry about if it is a subtopic or
not.

4. I'm having the same problem with series. Some books are part of a series.
And weirdly enough, some series are part of another series. So a series can
have a "subseries." I assume this would be solved the same way as the
topics.

Any other suggested you might have would of course be welcome too.

Thank you,
Jan