Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Replacing a "many to 1" relationship between series and books with a "many to many" relationship is not, in itself, a difficult problem; it can be done by adding a "book/series" link table into the database. But it would involve rewriting all the queries involving books and series, and every additional "join" in a query slows it down, so if (as I believe would be the case) the number of books that are in multiple series is small, the benefit of doing this is probably questionable.
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And that is the easy part.
Harder is changing every place where the item is used from "1 thing" to "many things". This affects every report, field editor, command line program that takes it as a parameter or writes it, web page where it appears, ajax point that can deliver it, ajax client, template that uses the field, and so on. Add on the questions related to how the items are ordered and sorted and things get even worse.