Recipe Data modal (w/ pic)

[chad101]

Hello, I’m just asking for some opinions on my recipe data modal. Besides programming, cooking nice meals has always been a big obsession of mine. I’m thinking about creating a recipe database. This is just a rough draft and I’m always open to suggestions.

Let me know what you think

 

[stopher]

I don't see the need for three one-to-one relationships. Surely Instructions, Time and Calories should all be in tblRecipes.

You might want to think about categorising your recipes e.g. starter, main, dessert. And perhaps a different category of, Meat, Fish, Vegetarian. Maybe also some kind of grading system.

What about cost?

At some point you might want to store images of your creations.

hth
Chris

 

[chad101]

I was trying to minimize null values. I won’t always know the given calories for a recipe.

I do agree with the time and instructions tables. I will combine these with the recipe table. taking a second look, i would agree almost all recipes will have instructions and time values

I love the categorizing idea. I will implement this – thank you

 

[stopher]

I was trying to minimize null values. I won’t always know the given calories for a recipe.

I might get some disagreement on this but if this is a practical database that I was creating then I'd make life easy by including calories in the recipes table. The point being I don't really care about the wasted space. Even when you have hundreds of thousands of recipes I doubt you'll detect any problem. On the other hand, if you put calories in a seperate table you will have to continually manage this e.g. by making join queries to make calories available in your forms.

If this is a piece of college work then I agree you have the right to argue the case to storing one-to-one data in a seperate table. Providing your arguement is strong enough then the choice is yours.

Chris