How do you deal with m..n relationships in a relational database?

Question

Let\'s look at an example - books. A book can have 1..n authors. An author can have 1..m books. What is a good way to represent all of the authors of a book?

I came

Answer 1

It really looks like you are wanting to create a series of custom join tables, that are used to associate items from one entity to another.

I would start at the most granular level, person and say that ANY author must be a person. I would simplify that process.

Create a person table with person information and a PersonId, put the information in there.

THen create a BookAuthors table, with 3 columns BookId, PersonId, TitledName. THis way you can use a different name if needed, if not, you can use COALESE or something similar to get the default name if TitledName is null.

Just an idea..