While doing a many to many relationship in SQL we create a table that will have the ID of the 2 tables that are forming the relationship. Sometimes in that table that we are creating, we put more data.
Example:
A table called worker and a table called department. Workers can work in many departments and many workers can work in the same department.
However the workers move between department and we need to store the year that they move into another department.
In mongoDB how can we represent that year. I am creating id for every worker and adding the department where they have worked but how do I store the year?
How to represente the WantedField.
one way that you could achieve this can be to just simply do the same thing in mongoDB, create another table just to save the relations of workers and departments.
Related
I have recently started designing database for one of my project. I am confused on one simple question "More Rows vs More Tables". I am not experienced enough to answer this question. Any help on this will be appreciated. Here is the scenario:
Scenario
I Have a Company. Company will have many Users, Vehicles.
More Rows:
Should I have 1 table for user and vehicle with reference to COMPANY_ID. Obviously over time it will have a lot of records. I have to use GUID as ID because of the requirement. So if it has too many records, I think it will effect the searching operation as well.
More Tables:
Should I have 2 tables created every time I add a new company with company prefix e.g. I add a new company "Tesla", table names will be like TESLA_USER, TESLA_VEHICLES. Obviously over time number of tables will increase a lot.
My concern is which is more efficient way? More Rows or More Tables?
Thank you
Cheers
D
You can create a table for the Companies, a table for users and a table for vehicles in which you put all your data. Then you add two joining tables who only stores the links between companies and users and companies and vehicles.
Example
First of all I have to mention that I am modernising our ERP system that is build in-house. It handles everything from purchasing of parts, sale orders, quotes and inventory to invoicing and statistical data. The system is web based and heavily dependent on ORM. EloquentORM will be used in the redesign.
My main question is about the data model of certain entities that are very similar. Currently three of most widely interconnected entities in the app are: Orders, Products and Invoices.
1. Orders
In current DB design I have one big orders table in which there is a order_type attribute to distinct between different order types: Purchase orders, Sale orders, Quotes and Service orders. About 80% of fields are common to each order type and there are some specific fields for each order types. Currently at ~15k records.
2. Products
Similarly I have one big products table with an attribute product_type to distinct between different product types: Finished products, Services, Assemblies and Parts. Again there is a fair % of fields that are common throughout all product types and some that are specific to different product type Currently at ~7k records.
3. Invoices
Again one table invoices with invoice_type attribute to distinct between 4 invoice types: Issued invoices (for things we sell), Received invoices (for things we buy), Credit notes and Avans Invoices. More or less all invoice types use the same fields. Currently at ~15k records.
I am now trying to decide which is the optimal way for this kind of DB model. I see three options:
1. Single Table Inheritance
Leave as is, everything in the same table. It feels kind of awkward to always filter records like where order_type = 'Sale order' to display right orders in the right place in GUI... Also when doing sale and purchase analytics I need to include the same where condition to fetch right orders. Seems wrong!
2. Class Table Inheritance
Have a master tables orders, products and invoices with common set of fields between each of entity types and then one-to-one child relation tables for every different type of each entity: sales_orders, purchase_orders, quote_orders, finished_products, reseller_products, part_products, assembly_products, received_invoices and issued_invoices with FK in each of the child tables to master table... This seems like a good idea but handling that with ORM brings in a little more complexity...
In this method I have a questions which FK should be used around. For example each invoice can belong to one order. Received invoice will go with Purchase order and issued invoice will go with Sale order. Should the master orders table's PK be used as a FK in the master invoices table to relate these entities, or should the child sale_orders PK be used in the child issued_invoices?
3. Concrete Table Inheritance
Having completely separated tables for every type of each entity. This would avoid me having parent->child relationship between master table but would result in a lot of similar attributes in each table...
What would be the best approach? I am aiming at ease of use in EloquentORM and also speed and scalability for the future.
I've run into a bit of a pickle during my development of a web application. I've boiled down the complexity of the application for sake of simplicity in this question.
The purpose of this web application is to sell insurance. Insurance can be purchased through an agent (Agency) or over the phone directly (Customer). Insurance policies can be paid through the agency or the customer can pay for the policy directly. So money is owed (invoiced) and received (payments) from multiple sources (Agencies/Customers).
Billing Options:
Agency (Agency collects from customer outside of app)
Customer
Here's where it gets complicated. Agencies are stored in a separate database table than customers (for obvious reasons). However, both agencies and customers need to be able to make payments and have invoices assigned to them. I'm having difficulty figuring out how to create the proper database schema to allow for both types of database records to be connected to their invoices and payments.
My initial plan was to set up separate relationship (joining) tables that link the agencies and customers to invoices/payments.
However, now that I've been thinking about the problem more, I think it might be beneficial to merge both agencies and customers into a single "Payee" table which would then be associated with payments/invoices. The payee table would only store a primary key. It would not contain actual names or info for the payee - instead I would pull that data via a JOIN with either the agencies or customers tables.
Regardless of whatever solution I choose I am still faced with the problem when creating a new payment record is that I need to scan both the agencies and customers table for possible payees. I'm wondering if there's a proper way to approach this from a database schema standpoint (or from an accounting/e-commerce standpoint).
What is the correct way to handle this type of situation? All ideas and possible solutions are most welcome!
Update 01:
After a few helpful suggestions (see below) I've come up with a possible solution that may solve this issue while keeping the data normalized.
The one thing about this method that rubs me the wrong way is that I will have to make multiple table selects to get a list of all the people who can potentially make payments and/or have invoices assigned to them.
Perhaps this is unavoidable though in this situation since indeed there are different "types" of people that can be associated with payments and invoices. I'm stuck with a situation where I have two different types of records that need to be associated to the same thing. In the above approach I'm using the FKs to link each table (Agencies/Customers) to a Payee record (the table that unifies both Agencies/Customers) and then ultimately links them to Payments and Invoices.
Is this the proper solution? Or is there something I've overlooked?
There are several options:
You might put this like you'd do it with OOP programming and inheritance.
There is one table Person which holds an uniqueID and a type (Agency, Customer, more in Future). Additionally you might add columns with meta-data like who inserted/when/why and columns for status/soft-delete/???
There are two tables Agency and Customer, both holding a PersonID as FK.
Your Payee is the Person
You might use a schema-bound VIEW with a UNION ALL to return both tables of your modell in one result. A unique index on this view should ensure, that you'll have a unique key, at least as combination of the table-source and the ID there.
You might use a middle table with the table-source and the ID there as unique Key and use this two-column-id in you payment process
For sure there are several more...
My best friend was the first option...
My suggestion would be: instead of Payees table - to have two linking tables:
PayeeInvoices {
Id, --PK
PayeeId,
PayeeType,
InvoiceId --FK to Invoices tabse
}
and
PayeePayments {
Id, --PK
PayeeId,
PayeeType,
PaymentId --FK to Payments table.
}.
PayeeType is an option of two: Customer or Agency. When creating a new payment record you can query PayeeInvoices by InvoiceId to get PayeeType and corresponding PayeeId, and then lookup the rest of the data in corresponding tables.
EDIT:
Having second thoughts now. Instead of two extra tables PayeeInvoices and PayeePayments, you can just have PayeeId and PayeeType columns right in Invocies and Payments tables, assuming that Invoice or Payment belongs only to one Payee (Customer or Agency). Both my solutions are not really normalized, though.
I'm creating this little Access DB, for the HR department to store all data related to all the training sessions that the company organizes for all the employees.
So, I have a Training Session table with information like date, subject, place, observations, trainer, etc, and the unique ID number.
Then there's the Personnel table, with employer ID (which is also the unique table number), names and working department.
So, after that I need another table that keeps a record of all the attendants of each training session. And here's the question, should I use a table for that in the first place? Does it have to be one table for each training session to store the attendants?
I've used excel for quite some time now, but I'm very new to Access and databases (even small ones like this). Any information will be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
It should be one table for persons, one table for trainings, and one for participation/attendance, to minimize (or best: avoid) repetition. Your tables should use primary and foreign keys, so that there are one-to-many relationships between trainings and attendances as well as people and attendances (the attendances table would then have a column referring to the person who attended, and another column referring to the training session).
Google "database normalization" for more detail and variations of that principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization).
Suppose I have a table for purchase orders. One customer might buy many products. I need to store all these products and their relevant prices in a single record, such as an invoice format.
If you can change the db design, Prefer to create another table called PO_products that has the PO_Id as the foreign key from the PurchaseOrder table. This would be more flexible and the right design for your requirement.
If for some reason, you are hard pressed to store in a single cell (which I re-iterate is not a good design), you can make use of XMLType and store all of the products information as XML.
Note: Besides being bad design, there is a significant performance cost of storing the data as XML.
This is a typical example of an n-n relationship between customer and products.
Lets say 1 customer can have from 0 to N products and 1 products can be bought by 0 to N customers. You want to use a junction table to store every purchase orders.
This junction table may contain the id of the purchase, the id of the customer and the id of the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-to-many_(data_model)