Page 2 - Database Design

This Data Model is a general "picture" of what everyone has been trying to explain to you.

Yeh I understand what people are saying, but thanks anyway for the diagramatic version

However, no one has answered the question directly as to whether what I want to achieve is possible with the use of 'normal' (one-to-many, primary key to foreign key) relationships only. Say I wanted to create such a relationship in Access (forget the whole SQL stuff for a moment) without the use of self-joins does anyone know if this is possible, and if so how it would be done? That would conclude this thread once and for all lol

Of course it is possible to create 2 entities in a one to many relationship.

Manager -*> Employee.

Done.

Consider some of the potential drawbacks of this approach:
You've essentially "embedded" a rigid one-many hierarchy on a situation that MAY require something more flexible:

E.G Consider what happens when the design needs to account for your manager's manager's manager?

That said, I've seen this type of relationship used effectively in these situations: it all depends on application scope and design goals.

THe benefits of a self-referential model really show themselves when the hierarchy may get "deeper" over the lifetime of the software.

Sooner or later you should ask yourself the question:

Why am I spending so much time and effort trying to get an answer to what so many people are telling me is the wrong question?

Either there is some deeper issue going on that you are not articulating or you are just obsessing.

Clive

Addressing the whole self-relationship idea, wouldn't that mean that the table would not be in Boyce-Codd's 3NF (Third Normal Form (all fields are independent of eachother))?

Here are the tables I have: tables. I have tried joining them in all sorts of forms but haven't been able to join them so that they work towards my goal...

The tuple is at the heart of all normalization concerns.

Read Celko's "SQL for Smarties" - there are several self-referential examples in there.

I'm not sure why you are so hung up on this issue.