Parent-child table layout

Question

I'm currently planning a piece of software for dogbreeders and I'm in doubt about my datadesign...whether I'm doing something smart or stupid :)

The plan at the moment is one holistic "dog" table sorta like this...

Id | Name | FatherId | MotherId
-------------------------------
1  | A    | NULL     | NULL
2  | B    | 1        | NULL
3  | C    | NULL     | NULL
4  | D    | NULL     | 3
5  | E    | 1        | 3
6  | F    | 5        | 2
7  | G    | 4        | 3

My questions is, is it common to make it like this or is it really sloppy. I can see a quick lookup reason to have it but I'm really in doubt whether it's good or bad in the end. I thinking it would be better designed if I had a rel-table on the side with Id coupling, but I'm really in doubt how well any of the cases are.

A side note is that it'll only be me personally looking at the data this way (or someone adopting the project from me)

Answer 1

This is a perfectly valid relational database design, you would probably be looking at doing self-joins to query the data.

Answer 2

Your design is fine. Parent to child is not a many-to-many relationship so there's no need for a separate link table.