I am using a database program to maintain my products, and I am wondering why the tables Products_by_attributes_stock and Products_options_values_to_options exist?

Why isn't the attributes quantity simply added directly to the attributes table?

And is there a reason to make a joint table between Products_options_values and Products_options? An option value can only be assigned to one option anyways, so it would make more sense to have the products_options_ID as a foreign key field directly in the products_options_values field.

The way this is made means my front-end system goes slower, and especially creating new options values are a pain because of the way this has been done. I am also curious from a database theory point of view - these two tables just don't make any sense, being one-to-one for very little information.


Is there a raison d'etre for these two tables?

And can they easily be disposed of with a search replace though all the files?
(Instead adding quantity directly to products_attributes and products_options_ID directly to products_options_values)