I'm a college student working with a recent SO data dump to learn about database queries and eventually formally model a standard procedure for getting statistical data from causal questions on relational schema. Big words aside, there's a "Parent ID" associated with an Answer, and I wanted to clarify whether or not that pointed to the Question the Answer was answering. Thanks for the help!
Update Here's the SO schema I've been working on, in the form of an Entity-Relationship diagram (all of this was translated from the readme.txt that came with a recent data dump):
So to help clarify: - rectangles are entities - diamonds are relationships - triangles represent an ontology - ovals are attributes Any entity that had a foreign key to another entity, that foreign key gets absorbed in a relationship. Ex) "Earns" has an earns_id, a user_id, and a badge_id, so showing badge_id as an attribute of user isn't necessary (the same goes for user_id in badge). And, cardinality is indicated by the crows feet being many, and single line being one.
So theoretically, each entity and relationship would get its own table when translated to DB.
Let me know if you think I'm on the right track, or if something seems horribly wrong, I appreciate it!