Working with object tables and relations

A question was raised during the Bestaurants workshop review: what if I want to write multiple reviews for a given restaurant or diner? Does the geodatabase support that? The answer is no. We have a single review field for each feature. We can add another field called REVIEW2, for instance, but it is infeasible as we will end up with a very rigid geodatabase design. It is not an elegant solution to the multiple reviews problem. It seems that we can't work out a solution for this with the skills we have acquired so far while working with feature classes. We need a new tool that can help us tackle this. Here is where object tables come into the picture.

Note

An object table is a table in the geodatabase that stores only the records without geometry.

Tables are extremely useful, and yes, we can create them in the geodatabase too! However, how can we use tables to solve the multiple reviews problem? For each restaurant, diner, and so on, there might...