This may be slightly off topic, as it probably isnt all that rdbm specific. If so, holler at me, and I'll learn..
I have a bunch of entities (book,e-book,author,country,cd,publisher) which are quite different in relational nature, and therefore can't easily be squeezed into the same table.
Common for all of them, however, is the need for a description. Thing is, there needs to be descriptions in (currently) 4 different languages, and the count may rise.
This relation is of a 1-N nature for each entity, and so, i've figured out, I use the unique id from the (book, e-book, author etc) tables as a foreign key in the description table, thus forging a relation.
The question (at last) is, how to have a foreign key reference more than one table? Obviously a description won't belong to an e-book, a country and a publisher at the same time, but only one of them.
Is my design fundamentally unsound, should there be a description table for each of the listed entities, or what am I to do?
In hope of helpful guidance,
Johnny J�rgensen
