@peter, the logic of structuring categories as entries in a table is one very sound one, If i were you i would not ignore it (unless this piece of software is what my peeps call &lt;hit and run &gt;, design the system with future needs in mind, create a table for categories, give them a unique id and in your query do a count where category id is used to deal with duplicates. <br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 8:24 PM,  <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:mwirigic@gmail.com">mwirigic@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
You can always add categories later if you come across an unhandled category.<br>
 For the question of an accident being in more than one category, you can introduce a table to map accidents to a category resulting in 3 tables<br>
<br>
1. Accident - contains the accident details, time, location...  Blah blah blah<br>
<br>
2. Categories - contains ur accidents defination<br>
<br>
3. AccidentMappings - maps an accident to a catrgory, contains 2 foreign keys categoryID, AccidentID . Add a unique key on (categoryID,AccidentID)<br>
<br>
Sent from my BlackBerry®<br>
<br>
-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Peter Karunyu &lt;<a href="mailto:pkarunyu@gmail.com">pkarunyu@gmail.com</a>&gt;<br>
Sender: <a href="mailto:skunkworks-bounces@lists.my.co.ke">skunkworks-bounces@lists.my.co.ke</a><br>
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:40:02<br>
To: Shadrack Mwaniki&lt;<a href="mailto:shadrack_mwaniki@yahoo.com">shadrack_mwaniki@yahoo.com</a>&gt;; Skunkworks Mailing List&lt;<a href="mailto:skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke">skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke</a>&gt;<br>
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<div class="im">Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] Database design question<br>
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