Relationship between Orders and Customers

[jongar]

Hi guys!

I am creating my first real database and I ran into a problem and would like some help.

I am having trouble creating the right relationship between two tables, Customers and Orders. Normally people think of orders as having one customer, my orders have 2 customers. In my Customers table I have the key field for customer number (CustomerID)and their name, phone etc. In the order table I have the key field order number (OrderID) and other info pertaining to the order, I also have the Sender Customer field (SendCustID) and the Receiver Customer Field (RecCustID). My question is, Is it correct to create a 1 to many relationship between CustomerID and SendCustID PLUS CustomerID and RecCustID? so that is 2 relationships for the same field in the Customers table


For some reason this feels incorrect and I do not want it to come back to haunt me later.
Thanks guys!

[orange]

see this link for more info

If you are new to database, work through this tutorial to get an appreciation of design concepts.
It will take 30-45 minutes, but you'll learn.

Good luck.

[rpeare]

There is nothing wrong with linking your customers to your orders multiple times, I do it all the time for things like survey questions and answers where I have 1 table holding all the questions on the survey and another table holding all the answers and the questions they belong to. However when you build queries etc. you will have to add your customers table 1 time for each link you intend to establish. In this case you have a SendCustomerID and a ReceiveCustomerID so you'd have to add your customer table 2 times when you go to produce reporting.