College course and section relationship

[timPM]

How would I represent this relationship between college courses and sections?


- I have a table for courses and a table for sections. The sections table contains only three rows, A, B, and C.
- Each course has three sections - A, B, and C

So a course has three sections and a section has many courses. Is this one to many or many to many? How I would I represent this in tables and connect the relationship?

[ranman256]

I wouldn't bother linking the relationships. As long as you have the needed keys, it will work.

[timPM]

What if I created a junction table with the key being a combination of the course and section # ? Or would this create too much redundant data?

Also if I don't link the relationships what happens if later I want to create a form where a user wanted to see which sections were available for a course?

[orange]

How does a section relate to a Course from the point of view of say, Student?

Student takes Course??
Often Courses are delivered/taught in Classes and there may be several Classes for the same Course.
Class may be a class session (stream 2--Tues 9AM Room 112 Teacher Smith S for example)
Just trying to understand where you will use this...
eg.

Physics 101 is available in say 3 streams

Stream1 Mon 9AM room 100, Wed 2PM Room 328, Fri 11AM Room 101 <--Teacher Jones J
Stream2 Mon 2PM room 230, Tue 9AM Room 112, Fri 10AM Room 306 <-Teacher Smith S
Stream3 Tues 8AM room 300, Wed 3PM Room 328, Thu 2PM Room 306< Shah A

[timPM]

Well I would eventually like to create forms so that students/teachers could see different information about different sections that have different teachers etc like you listed up. I was going to create a third table just called CourseSection so that both primary keys from the table could be foreign keys and create the new primary key, that way each class could have an entry for each section.

So i would have a course table, section table, and this table:

ID(auto#) course# section#
1 -AST101 - A
2 -AST101 - B
3 -AST101 - C
4 -MAT105 - A

etc ....


But wouldn't this create too much redundancy? Even if each record could be updated easily from it's primary key table...

[orange]

?? I don't really understand your question

Regarding redundancy-- I don't think we have fully described the "business", so I don't think redundancy is anything that can be commented on, yet. You need to identify all the "things/entities" involved, and the business rules that relate them.
Forms are the users' interface to the database and also a part of the application. Getting the data identified and structured is important. Knowing the kinds of queries/questions that could be asked of the data, and knowing the type of information/reports you want out of the system will go a long way to identify what the database must contain. I don't think you are there yet.

Good luck with your project.

[timPM]

For sure I completely understand what you're saying. I could have explained a bit of background better too, I'm creating this database for a final exam for my first database management class in community college, so I'm a beginner. The final is to create a college database system with a couple tables/records, relationships, basic forms/reports etc, nothing too complex or concrete, it's kind of up to me. To be honest for a bit I didn't even know what MY question was.

I guess I'm just wondering if my design up there would work well, be acceptable, and/or be considered proper design/be normalized.

I'm trying to identify the relationship between the entities "course" and "section". This was the first relationship I came across mentally so I haven't set up other relationships between students/instructors etc. I want it to be a many to many relationship where course A has sections 1, 2, and 3 .... course B has sections 1, 2, and 3 etc. So each section wouldn't necessarily have it's own instructor, but rather just give information start/end dates and class size etc.

I have a course table and a section table, and I created a junction table between those two because I know that's whats required for many to many relationships. So I get something like this -

ID(auto#) course# section#
1 -AST101 - A
2 -AST101 - B
3 -AST101 - C
4 -MAT105 - A
etc ...
(sorry for the spacing)

I'm just wondering if this table design / relationship representation is "okay".

[orange]

I'm not clear on your term "section".
I'm going to suggest this tutorial for you to work through. It will probably take ~45 minutes, but you will learn a lot to go along with your assignment. The things you experience in the tutorial can be applied to your project.

Good luck.

[timPM]

Perfect thank you so much for the help!!!

And honestly I'm not too clear about sections either, but to my understanding my college has different sections for each class that determine how big each class is, but it's a random # like 23456. I'm not sure if these sections are unique to classes or what, so I decided to have A, B, and C to determine how big the class is, what semester it's in, etc

Thank you for the tutorial!

[orange]

You are welcome. Good luck.