[Database class] Database Project Help

[Paul S. Wang]

Good question.  See may comments.  Sending to whole class.

> Hello Professor Wang,
> 
> With my current database design, I have a relationship set that is related
> to 4 other sets. The book discourages this and only recommends 2-way
> relationships. However, I do not know how to implement my database
> otherwise.
> 
> This relationship set I have is called "arrests", and has foreign keys to
> the tables "officer", "criminal", "city_section", and "crime". Is this ok?
> Thank you.

If you have an "offense" table that deals with criminal, crime, location, ... 
will cut it down to "arrest" with FKs to "officer" and "offense".
This way,  an offense may involve one or more criminals.  
Question:  is it true that each arrest has a unique officer?  Can the same
crime incident involve multiple officers?  multiple criminals?  multiple
different offenses?  These will all impact on your design.  And any
such assumptions made in your design must be carefully documented so
that when entering info into tables these assumptions are followed.

What do you think?
Paul
-- 
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 Paul S. Wang (王士弘)                      Email: pwang at cs.kent.edu            
 Dept. of Computer Science, Kent State U.   Tel: (330) 672-9051
 Kent, Ohio, USA 44242-0001                 http://www.cs.kent.edu/~pwang/ 
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