Er, how many records are we talking about? I don't really see this table getting too unmanageable. He's not frbrizing Worldcat this way, after all. -Ross. On 5/22/06, Jonathan Gorman <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > On Mon, 22 May 2006, Houghton,Andrew wrote: > > > > > I don't think a two column table relating ISBN to ISBN is the > > proper data model. As Ben pointed out in his message: "But if > > we cross-reference every ISBN to every other, we'll have a > > factorial number of rows, which is probably less than optimal." > > It also means that the SQL table isn't fully normalized. > > > > No, I don't either, but it's simpler. Which was why I was a bit curious > about it. Also, I missed the important fact they were only going to > display the links for those contained within the same catalog. My mind > was already going to a openurl-type service. A scenario where one might > want to know the related ISBNs, but there might be relatively few source > ISBNs compared to "related" ISBNs. The performance cost might be less > than the effort of creating and maintaining a "FRBR" key for each work. > Of course, I'm happy to find some of the OCLC work on FRBR groups that I > didn't know about. Looks like something to go back and look at some more > during lunch. > > So sorry for the cruddy advice Ben ;). > > Jonathan T. Gorman > Visiting Research Information Specialist > University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana > 216 Main Library - MC522 > 1408 West Gregory Drive > Urbana, IL 61801 > Phone: (217) 244-4688 > >