I have 2 questions regarding a project. Would appreciate if I get clarifications on that.
I have decomposed Address into individual entities by breaking down to the smallest
unit. Bur addresses are repeated in a few tables. Like Address fields are there in the
Client table as well as Employee table. Should we separate the Address into a separate table with just a linking field
For Example
Create an ADDRESS Table with the following attributes :
Entity_ID ( It could be a employee ID(Home Address) or a client ID(Office Address) )
Unit
Building
Street
Locality
City
State
Country
Zipcode
Remove all the address fields from the Employee table and the Client table
We can obtain the address by getting the employee ID and referring the ADDRESS table for the address
Which approach is better ? Having the address fields in all tables or separate as shown above. Any thoughts on which design in better ?
Ya definitely separating address is better Because people can have multiple addresses so it will be increasing data redundancy.
You can design the database for this problem in two ways according to me.
A. Using one table
Table name --- ADDRESS
Column Names
Serial No. (unique id or primary key)
Client / Employee ID
Address.
B. Using Two tables
Table name --- CLIENT_ADDRESS
Column Names
Serial No. (unique id or primary key)
Client ID (foreign key to client table)
Address.
Table name --- EMPLOYEE_ADDRESS
Column Names
Serial No. (unique id or primary key)
Client ID (foreign key to employee table)
Address.
Definitely you can use as many number of columns instead of address like what you mentioned Unit,Building, Street e.t.c
Also there is one suggestion from my experience
Please add this five Columns in your each and every table.
CREATED_BY (Who has created this row means an user of the application)
CREATED_ON (At what time and date table row was created)
MODIFIED_ON (Who has modified this row means an user of the application)
MODIFIED_BY (At what time and date table row was modified)
DELETE_FLAG (0 -- deleted and 1 -- Active)
The reason for this from point of view of most of the developers is, Your client can any time demand records of any time period. So If you are deleting in reality then it will be a serious situation for you. So every time when a application user deleted an record from gui you have to set the flag as 0 instead of practically deleting it. The default value is 1 which means the row is still active.
At time of retrieval you can select with where condition like this
select * from EMPOLOYEE_TABLE where DELETE_FLAG = 1;
Note : This is an suggestion from my experience. I am not at all enforcing you to adopt this. So please add it according to your requirement.
ALSO tables which don't have any significant purpose doesn't need this.
Separating address into a seperate table is a better design decision as it means any db-side validation logic etc. only needs to be maintained in one place.
Related
I have a table Subject
It has many fields, two of them are code and flag.
Earlier those two fields was an idempotention key for rows in this table.
But, now I need one more option system.
There are tens of rows in Subject
And 4-7 systems.
What is a better way?
Create table System for systems and create cross-table of mapping sysytems on subjects (code and flag are still in table Subject)
Create one table of mapping without creating table System
Just add another column in table Subject
Create table System and add to the table Subject foreign key for table System?
So, It's all about database normalization.
And the third option is pretty bad.
As for me the better way is fourth option.
But, I can`t explain to yourself why this option is better than 1 and 2.
So, I read rules of database normalization. And as for me, the first option satisfies all rules too.
This is the reason why I am asking this question.
It is not typically a great idea to design a SQL schema to 1st or 2nd normal form; many databases use something at or near 3rd normal form however there many still be some relationships in 3rd normal form where dependencies exist where redundancy still exists. This can be addressed by Boyce–Codd Normal Form (Codd, 1974).
It is also not typical to see 4th normal form and less so 5th normal form and beyond due to challenges with data maintenance in a "living" database.
Let's put this another way.
If you find yourself creating NULLable values constraints on many columns consider a table to contain those in an organized fashion - for example an Address table for addresses with a linking table from say for example a Person to a PersonAddress linking table to that Address table where the PersonAddress linking table might even have an AdddressTypeId column which links to an AddressType table with rows for Address Type Postal and Address Type Street or Address Type Business. For another example consider email addresses where people have personal, family, business and other email address types; even multiple of the same type for different uses; a doctor with a business practice email and 2-3 hospital email addresses where the doctor practices.
Linking tables for those type scenarios are likely better than 3-4 or more email or postal address columns in one table where many after the first are nullable or perhaps redundant.
Review your data; consider if your Subject for example may link to multiple System or placing a SubjectId column may lead to duplicates of that ID for differing system rows. If it is always and forever a 1-1 relationship it may be OK but for a 1-n or n-n it may not be ok to have the id in the other table and a linking table may provide a good mechanism to link them.
I am attempting to create an Employee table in SQL Server 2016 and I want to use EmpID as the Primary Key and Identity. Here is what I believe to be true and my question: When I create the Employee table with EmpID as the Primary Key and an Identity(100, 1) column, each time I add a new employee, SQL Server will auto create the EmpID starting with 100 and increment by 1 with each new employee. What happens if I want to import a list of existing employees from another company and those employees already have an existing EmpID? I haven't been able to figure out how I would import those employees with the existing EmpID. If there is a way to import the employee list with the existing EmpID, will SQL Server check to make sure the EmpID's from the new list does not exist for a current employee? Or is there some code I need to write in order to make that happen?
Thanks!
You are right about primary keys, but about importing employees from another company and Merging it with your employee list, you have to ask these things:
WHY? Sure there are ways to solve this problem, but why will you merge other company employees into your company employee?
Other company ID structure: Most of the time, companies have different ID structure, some have 4 characters others have only numbers so on and so forth. But you have to know the differences of the companies ID Structure.
If the merging can't be avoided, then you have to tell the higher ups about the concern, and you have to tell them that you have to give the merging company new employee ID's which is a must. With this in my, simply appending your database with the new data is the solution.
This is an extremely normal data warehousing issue where a table has data sources from multiple places. Also comes up in migration, acquisitions, etc.
There is no way to keep the existing IDs as a primary key if there are multiple people with the same ID.
In the data warehouse world we would always create a new surrogate key, which is the primary key to the table, and include the original key and a source system identifier as two attributes.
In your scenario you will probably keep the existing keys for the original company, and create new IDs for the new employees, and save the oldID in an additional column for historical use.
Either of these choices also means that as you migrate other associated data such as leave information imported from the old system, you can translate it to the new key by looking up OldID in the employee table, and finding the associated newID to associate it with when saving your lave records in the new system.
At the end of the day there is no alternative to this, as you simply cant have two employees with the same primary key.
I have never seen any company that migrate employees from another company and keep their existed employee id. Usually, they'll give them a new ID and keep the old one in the employee file for references uses. But they never uses the old one as an active ID ever.
Large companies usually uses serial of special identities that are already defined in the system to distinguish employees based on field, specialty..etc.
Most companies they don't do the same as large ones, but instead, they stick with one identifier, and uses dimensions as an identity. These dimensions specify areas of work for employees, projects, vendors ..etc. So, they're used in the system globally, and affected on company financial reports (which is the main point of using it).
So, what you need to do is to see the company ID sequence requirements, then, play your part on that. As depending on IDENTITY alone won't be enough for most companies. If you see that you can depend on identity alone, then use it, if not, then see if you can use dimensions as an identity (you could create five dimensions - Company, Project, Department, Area, Cost Center - it will be enough for any company).
if you used identity alone, and want to migrate, then in your insert statement do :
SET IDENTITY_INSERT tableName ON
INSRT INTO tableName (columns)
...
this will allow you to insert inside identity column, however, doing this might require you to reset the identity to a new value, to avoid having issues. read DBCC CHECKIDENT
If you end up using dimensions, you could make the dimension and ID both primary keys, which will make sure that both are unique in the table (treated as one set).
I edited and remade the ERD. I have a few more questions.
I included participation constraints(between trainee and tutor), cardinality constraints(M means many), weak entities (double line rectangles), weak relationships(double line diamonds), composed attributes, derived attributes (white space with lines circle), and primary keys.
Questions:
Apparently to reduce redundant attributes I should only keep primary keys and descriptive attributes and the other attributes I will remove for simplicity reasons. Which attributes would be redundant in this case? I am thinking start_date, end_date, phone number, and address but that depends on the entity set right? For example the attribute address would be removed from Trainee because we don't really need it?
For the part: "For each trainee we like to store (if any) also previous companies (employers) where they worked, periods of employment: start date and end date."
Isn't "periods of employment: start date, end date" a composed attribute? because the dates are shown with the symbol ":" Also I believe I didn't make an attribute for "where they worked" which is location?
Also how is it possible to show previous companies (employers) when we already have an attribute employers and different start date? Because if you look at the Question Information it states start_date for employer twice and the second time it says start_date and end_date.
I labeled many attributes as primary keys but how am I able to distinguish from derived attribute, primary key, and which attribute would be redundant?
Is there a multivalued attribute in this ERD? Would salary and job held be a multivalued attribute because a employer has many salaries and jobs.
I believe I did the participation constraints (there is one) and cardinality constraints correctly. But there are sentences where for example "An instructor teaches at least a course. Each course is taught by only one instructor"; how can I write the cardinality constraint for this when I don't have a relationship between course and instructor?
Do my relationship names make sense because all I see is "has" maybe I am not correctly naming the actions of the relationships? Also I believe schedules depend on the actual entity so they are weak entities.... so does that make course entity set also a weak entity (I did not label it as weak here)?
For the company address I put a composed attribute, street num, street address, city... would that be correct? Also would street num and street address be primary keys?
Also I added the final mark attribute to courses and course_schedule is this in the right entity set? The statement for this attribute is "Each trainee identified by: unique code, social security number, name, address, a unique telephone number, the courses attended and the final mark for each course."
For this part: "We store in the database all classrooms available on the site" do i make a composed attribute that contains site information?
Question Information:
A trainee may be self-employed or employee in a company
Each trainee identified by:
unique code, social security number, name, address, a unique
telephone number, the courses attended and the final mark for each course.
If the trainee is an employee in a company: store the current company (employer), start date.
For each trainee we like to store (if any) also previous companies (employers) where they worked, periods of employment: start date and end date.
If a trainee is self-employed: store the area of expertise, and title.
For a trainee that works for a company: we store the salary and job
For each company (employer): name (unique), the address, a unique telephone number.
We store in the database all known companies in the
city.
We need also to represent the courses that each trainee is attending.
Each course has a unique code and a title.
For each course we have to store: the classrooms, dates, and times (start time, and duration in minutes) the course is held.
A classroom is characterized by a building name and a room number and the maximum places’ number.
A course is given in at least a classroom, and may be scheduled in many classrooms.
We store in the database all classrooms
available on the site.
We store in the database all courses given at least once in the company.
For each instructor we will store: the social security number, name, and birth date.
An instructor teaches at least a course.
Each course is taught by only one instructor.
All the instructors’ telephone numbers must also be stored (each instructor has at least a telephone number).
A trainee can be a tutor for one or many trainees for a specific
period of time (start date and end date).
For a trainee it is not mandatory to be a tutor, but it is mandatory to have a tutor
The attribute ‘Code’ will be your PK because it’s only use seems to be that of a Unique Identifier.
The relationship ‘is’ will work but having a reference to two tables like that can get messy. Also you have the reference to "Employers" in the Trainee table which is not good practice. They should really be combined. See my helpful hints section to see how to clean that up.
Company looks like the complete table of Companies in the area as your details suggest. This would mean table is fairly static and used as a reference in your other tables. This means that the attribute ‘employer’ in Employed would simply be a Foreign Key reference to the PK of a specific company in Company. You should draw a relationship between those two.
It seems as though when an employee is ‘employed’ they are either an Employee of a company or self-employed.
The address field in Company will be a unique address your current city, yes, as the question states the table is a complete list of companies in the city. However because this is a unique attribute you must have specifics like street address because simply adding the city name will mean all companies will have the same address which is forbidden in an unique field.
Some other helpful hints:
Stay away from adding fields with plurals on them to your diagram. When you have a plural field it often means you need a separate table with a Foreign Key reference to that table. For example in your Table Trainee, you have ‘Employers’. That should be a Employer table with a foreign key reference to the Trainee Code attribute. In the Employer Table you can combine the Self-employed and Employed tables so that there is a single reference from Trainee to Employer.
ERD Link http://www.imagesup.net/?di=1014217878605. Here's a quick ERD I created for you. Note the use of linker tables to prevent Many to Many relationships in the table. It's important to note there are several ways to solve this schema problem but this is just as I saw your problem laid out. The design is intended to help with normalization of the db. That is prevent redundant data in the DB. Hope this helps. Let me know if you need more clarification on the design I provided. It should be fairly self explanatory when comparing your design parameters to it.
Follow Up Questions:
If you are looking to reduce attributes that might be arbitrary perhaps phone_number and address may be ones to eliminate, but start and end dates are good for sorting and archival reasons when determining whether an entry is current or a past record.
Yes, periods_of_employment does not need to be stored as you can derive that information with start and end dates. Where they worked I believe is just meant to say previous employers, so no location but instead it’s meant that you should be able to get a list all the employers the trainee has had. You can get that with the current schema if you query the employer table for all records where trainee code equals requested trainee and sort by start date. The reason it states start_date twice is to let you know that for all ‘previous’ employers the record will have a start and end date. Hence the previous. However, for current employers the employment hasn't ended which means there will be no end_date so it will null. That’s what the problem was stating in my opinion.
To keep it simple PK’s are unique values used to reference a record within another table. Redundant values are values that you essentially don’t need in a table because the same value can be derived by querying another table. In this case most of your attributes are fine except for Final_Mark in the Course table. This is redundant because Course_Schedule will store the Final_Mark that was received. The Course table is meant to simply hold a list of all potential courses to be referenced by Course_Schedule.
There is no multivalued attributes in this design because that is bad practice Job and salary are singular and if and job or salary changes you would add a new record to the employer table not add to that column. Multivalued attributes make querying a db difficult and I would advise against it. That’s why I mentioned earlier to abstract all attributes with plurals into their own tables and use a foreign key reference.
You essentially do have that written here because Course_Schedule is a linker table meaning that it is meant to simplify relationships between tables so you don’t have many to many relationships.
All your relationships look right to me. Also since the schedules are linker tables and cannot exist without the supporting tables you could consider them weak entities. Course in this schema is a defined list of all courses available so can be independent of any other table. This by definition is not a weak entity. When creating this db you’d probably fill in the course table and it probably wouldn’t change after that, except rarely when adding or removing an available course option.
Yes, you can make address a composite attribute, and that would be right in your diagram. To be clear with your use of Primary key, just because an attribute is unique doesn’t make it a primary key. A table can have one and only one primary key so you must pick a column that you are certain will not be repeated. In this example you may think street number might be unique but what if one company leaves an address and another company moves into that spot. That would break that tables primary key. Typically a company name is licensed in a city or state so cannot be repeated. That would be a better choice for your primary key. You can also make composite primary keys, but that is a more advanced topic that I would recommend reading about at a later date.
Take final_mark out of courses. That’s table will contain rows of only courses, those courses won’t be linked to any trainee except by course_schedule table. The Final_Mark should only be in that table. If you add final_mark to Course table then, if you have 10 trainees in a course, You’d have 10 duplicate rows in the course table with only differing final_marks. Instead only hold the course_code and title that way you can assign different instructors, trainees and classrooms using the linker tables.
No composite attribute is needed using this schema. You have a Classroom table that will hold all available classrooms and their relevant information. You then use the Classroom_Schedule linker table to assign a given Classroom to a Course_Schedule. No attributes of Classroom can be broken down to simpler attributes.
Can somebody make sure my database is in the 3rd normal form, and if not, explain why not?
I need the DB to only have 3 tables. So here it is:
Customer No. (PK) Store No. (PK) Sale No. (PK)
Name Location Customer No. (FK)
Telephone Revenue Store No. (FK)
Address Total
Purchases($) Paid
Store No.
Here are what your three tables should be: Table 1: Customer
Customer No. (PK)
Name
Telephone
Address
then Table 2: Store
Store no. (PK)
Location
then Table 3: Sale
Sale No. (PK)
Customer No (FK)
Store No (FK)
Total
Paid_yes_no
If you are trying to track partial payments, etc. through the Paid column, then it would be a separate table (and a much more complicated database). However, if your Paid column just indicates whether the bill has been paid or not, the above should work.
Perhaps you need a Date field there as well?
There are a few problems, some of this may be as the specification is for homework rather than the real world.
Store No. in Customers is a duplicated column It's reasonable to expect that a business with multiple stores have customers who use multiple stores - unless your specification says otherwise and in which case the taxonomy (naming) should be expanded, you could consider First Store No. or Home Store No. instead. Also it should be marked up as a foreign key if it is to remain.
Purchases($) in the customers table is reliant on other data which will change. Since it is derived from other information you should not store it.
Address is not a single column - it has multiple parts like Street, City, State, Country & ZIP Code may in turn require extra tables details to fully satisfy 2nd Normal Form. Similarly Telephone is unlikely to be just one number.
Each thing you need to know should appear once and once only. If you can calculate it from something else you should do that rather than store the answer. In the real world you might sometimes cache some information in a table or batch process it for performance, but those would be applied later and only if necessary.
A brief overview of database normalisation is at http://databases.about.com/od/specificproducts/a/normalization.htm which you should probably look through before reworking your project.
I am wondering if it is okay to have master and detail table for employees?
As per requirments, data can filtered by department by country and by employee code on report level.
If employee's department or country code is changed then the changes will go in detail table and old record will be set to IS_ACTIVE = 'T'.
---------------------Master Table--------------------------------------
**EMPLOYEE_CODE** VARCHAR2(20 BYTE) NOT NULL,
EMAIL VARCHAR2(100 BYTE)
FIRST_NAME VARCHAR2(50 BYTE)
LAST_NAME VARCHAR2(50 BYTE)
WORKING_HOURS NUMBER
---------------------Detail Table--------------------------------------
**PK_USER_DETAIL_ID** NUMBER,
FK_EMPLOYEE_CODE VARCHAR2(20 BYTE),
FK_GROUP NUMBER,
FK_DEPARTMENT_CODE NUMBER,
FK_EMPLOYER_COUNTRY_CODE VARCHAR2(5 BYTE),
FK_MANAGER_ID VARCHAR2(20 BYTE),
FK_ROLE_CODE VARCHAR2(6 BYTE),
START_DATE DATE,
END_DATE DATE,
IS_ACTIVE VARCHAR2(1 BYTE),
INACTIVE_DATE DATE
Employee table will be linked with Timesheet table and for timesheet reports data can be filtered by department, country and by employee code.
OPTION : I
Have one employee table with one Primary Key and create a new entry whenever department or role is updated for an employee.
Add country and department code in the timesheet table.
--> This way i don't need to search employee table.
OPTION : II
Have master and detail table.
Add country and department code in timesheet table.
--> This way i don't need to search employee table plus i will have master detail table
OPTION : NEW
Have master and detail table.
Timesheet table will have EmpCode.
If user move to new location or change department then Insert a new row in the detail table with the new dept Code and same Emp No.
Update an old row and set the End Date field so if he changes his location or department then the End Date field needs to be updated.
Which one is a best option and is there any other better option available?
This is one way of implementing this requirement, and it's an approach many people take. However, it has on emajor drawback: every time you query the current employee status you need to filter the details on start and end date. This may seem like a trivial thing, but you wouldn't believe how much confusion it can cause, and it has performance implications too.
These things matter, because most of the time you will want only the current details, with queries on history being a relatively rare occurence. Consequently you are hampering the implementation of your most common use case to make it easier to implement a less-used one. (Of course I am making assumptions about your business requirements, and perhaps yours is not a run-of-the-mill employee application...)
The better solution would be to have two tables, an EMPLOYEES table with all the detail columns too and an EMPLOYEES_HISTORY table with the same columns plus the start and end date. When you change an employee's record insert a copy of the old record in the History table, probably by a trigger. Your standard processes have just the one table to query, and your history needs are met fully.
By the way, your proposed data model is wrong. Working_hours, email_address and last_name are definitely things which can change and perhaps even first name (e.g. through changes in personal circumstances such as getting married). So all those columns should be held in your details name
Option 3 - Please note that this option is useful only for the reports Point of View.
Whenever you insert the data, create a De-Normalized entry in a new table.
Whenever an entry will be updated, the De-Normalized entry will be updated in the new table.
The New Table will have all De-Normalized columns of Employee.
So while Performing the search, this will benefit you as the results will be calculated without using Joins. Thus, the access time will be reduced.
Records in the new table will be Created/Updated in The Insert/Update Trigger.
Improvements in Option - 2 and Option 1
Don't create redundancy by adding duplicate columns.