As a steel broker, buying and selling steel worldwide but mostly in the US, I have many customers. Those customer use many products, those products have many grades, many shapes, many manufacturing distinctions and many finishes. All of these  manys  get compounded by the fact that they reciprocate within categories. In other words, a product like pipe could be made from steel, aluminum etc, have many grades, many shapes, be used by many customer and have many finishes. The complexities are mind boggling. The question is how to create a data base that handles all of this. Who might have an idea?

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Reply from Richard Rost:

Well, you could make a Product table and then an Attributes table. To relate it to something I know best, let's say you were building computers. Your Product table would contain the names of the different computers you were selling:

ProductID, Name, Cost
1, Model 1000, $500
2, Model 2000, $1000
3, Model 3000, $2000

Then your Attributes table could list the components in each computer:

AttribID, ProductID, AttribName
1, 1, Full Tower Case
2, 1, 8 GB RAM
3, 1, 2 TB Hard Drive
etc.

It doesn't matter how many Attributes you assign to each product. I'd treat your products the same way. Aluminum, grades, shapes... those are all attributes. Set them up in a simple 1-to-many relationship like I cover in Access Expert 1.