ChrisM@Work (4/25/2013)
This doesn't really address the point I raised. If phone number is an attribute of [Person] or [Staff] or whatever, what would you gain by abstracting phone number into a separate table? Surely it can only cost more? Can you raise any argument which might support phone number not being an attribute of [Person]?
Chris, can you help me understand your approach because the way I understand what you are describing it seems that a record for the [person] would have to exists multiple times in its table in order to track multiple [phone numbers] as the phone attributes are integrated into the person table?
Also, I should point out that the many to many relationship I refer to is not the standard many to many model. In a one to many model, a person exists once and a phone record exists X times. In the model I am describing, the phone number exists once per object of different types (person, manager, staff, etc), but since it is not tied to a specific object type, I have called this the "complex many to many relationship" as I do not know how else to describe this model.
G.