Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Horses for courses I spose and I do like the flexibility of the single table approach. However, I wasn't suggesting subcategories would be mixed and matched with categories, what I was suggesting was that subcategories were 'owned' (my old SYNON/2 days coming back) by categories and, in turn, products would be 'owned' by subcategories so:

Category: 01 Mens Clothing

Subcategory: 01 (from Category) 01 Shirts

Product: 01 (from cat) 01 (from subcat) 001 Blue Corn Crackin' shirt

That wouldn't provide any UX issues as far as I can see, but maybe I 've missed something. Probably less flexible that your solution but maybve more rigorous in design ...

Different views, different solutions - that's what keeps the world turnin' innit?

Once again, great book - only on page 89 so far but picked up so much from it.

cheers,
Patch.