Best practice for multiple 0,1 to many relationships I'm an application developer without a ton of database design experience and I'm wondering if someone can suggest a design/implementation for relating one table to one or more other tables.

For example, if I have Account, Policy and Claim tables, each may have 0 or more Contacts.

I could define multiple foreign key fields in the Contacts table, but there must be a better way.

i.e.

varchar(50) contact_name
varchar(100) contact_address
bigint Account_ID
bigint Policy_ID
bigint Claim_ID
This will really depend on many factors, beginning with your choice of RDBMS, and followed by your application language and framework. The choice will be very different if you use some form of RAILS and mysql (where database design is driven by class design in your application), than PHP and PostgreSQL (where you can choose to use create a CONTACT composite type, and keep contacts as an array of contacts in a column on each of your databases, without a separate table for it).