I have a simple app and in this app there are 2 roles. Role 1 is a Buyer and Role 2 is a Seller. A seller can setup a post to list an item for sale. A buyer can bid on the item in a post the seller posted.

I've been thinking of a way to prevent circular reference here but I think I am over thinking it or missing another path. What would be the best way to configure this setup?

CodePudding user response：

There is actually no circular reference to worry about here. BuyerBids and SellerPosts are fact tables (where the second has details about the first), and MarketUsers is a dimension table.

The many-to-one relations are toward the dimension table, as is expected.

There is no cycle where you would follow relations from the many side to the one side via many-to-one. For example if you start in SellerPosts you have a many-to-one to BuyerBids and from there to MarketUsers, but from there we don't have an outgoing many-to-one relation linking back to where we started.

In other words, if the graph formed by many-to-one relations (as directed edges) is a directed acyclic graph (which it is, in this case), the model is not circular.