I am creating an Entity-Relationship Model in which a Student can have many Students, thus characterizing many-to-many self-relationship.
However, I am in doubt as to how to implement this self-relationship at the time of the bank's creation. Should I create the Student table and a second table having two Student keys?
If it helps, I'm doing this relationship to identify which friends a Student has added into the system.
Yes, the way to represent a many-to-many relationship is to break it into an intermediary table. For example in MySQL we would do:
create table a(
id int primary key auto_increment,
text varchar(60)
);
create table b(
id int primary key auto_increment,
text varchar(60)
);
Now the relationship of the tables
create table a_b(
id int primary key auto_increment,
a_id int,
b_id int
FOREIGN KEY (a_id) REFERENCES a(id),
FOREIGN KEY (b_id) REFERENCES b(id)
);