Can't imagine how else it would be done. And why would the mothers table have to have any specific info on the children? The number of matching records in the child table (which could additionally be keyed on "child number") would yield the information.


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>I guess the way I'd be tempted to solve this problem would be to create a mothers table with a unique record for each mother which specifies the number of children and the name of, say the oldest.
>The latter would be used in a relation into a table of children where each child's record points to its next younger sibling (or to null).
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>Is this basic approach (with refinements for obvious problems) what is commonly used, or is there a more widely accepted approach?