thanks for the response, si! and whoops. yes, you were correct in your thinking. I guess I forgot to mention that the table had a comma delimited string in one field.

the web application I'm building will be used for students to find information about careers. so, there are: careers, industries, companies, schools, videos. companies would have related careers, industries, and videos. schools would have the same. if I were to use your idea, I would need a table for each of these relationships -- SchoolsToCareers, SchoolsToIndustries, SchoolsToVideos -- would I not? this is not exactly desirable either, but it would work.

after thinking about having a junction table, I thought I might instead have a table with four fields. along with the two fields for both IDs, I'd have two enums that described what those IDs represent (one enum would be company/school, the other would be career/industry/video). this wouldn't do much other than lessen the number of tables used, I guess. do you think this would be as efficient, or just less so?