I have the following situation.
We want an reputation table to evaluate Users And Companies.
This reputation table would store the reputation given by an Company to User and vice-versa.
It was suggested that we should create two reputation tables, one for the Users and another for the Companies, both with the same columns.
I dont think thats the best way but I cant find another solution.
Is there any other way we could do that?
thx
I don't think your approach is bad; another solution would be to have an abstract Entity table, with each User and Company having its own Entity record (and thus entity ID); then you only track reputation between two entities in a single Reputation table.
Another approach is to have a Reputation table with a user ID, a company ID, and a type (or direction, or whatever seems logical in your model) field which indicates whether it is reputation for the company given by the user, or the other way around. Seems less normalized though.
You would have a table for the company containing a unique key for that Co. Same for the user.
I assume the relationship between Co and User is many-to-many.
You need one more table containing both keys, for Co and User, and two fields, one for Co-rep and one for User-rep. The Co-key and User-key combination would be unique entries for this table.
Related
Hey I need to redesign the Customer table shown below.
So I want the redesigned ERD to allow a Customer to be either an individual or an organization (so maybe I need a new attribute called OrganizationName?) .
And each individual customer should have their Email recorded, but an organization may leave the Email column blank.
I've been thinking about how I should redesign it for a few hours and still could not find any good approaches.
So does anyone here have any ideas?
Thanks
If you want to keep it really clean your Customer table could contain just two foreign keys, one to a Person table and one to an Organization table. Only one of the foreign keys would be populated and the other null.
Doing it this way means extra tables and relationships but saves you from overloading a single table to handle two different types of entities.
Just a homework question I am trying to figure out, I would appreciate some assistance.
Apparently, there are three problems with the design of this database design:
Account = {AccNumber, Type, Balance}
Customer = {CustID, FirstName, LastName, Address, AccNumber}
The one that is pretty obvious is that 'CustID' is useless if 'AccNumber' exists.
I am not quite sure about the second and third problem.
Is there a problem with a separate attribute for 'FirstName' and "LastName', cant we just use 'Name'?
And another option, if 'AccNumber' is the primary key (assuming CustID will be removed), it probably should be place in the beginning :
Such as:
Customer = {AccNumber, Name, Address}
Any input would be appreciated!
Thanks
The customer-account relationship, at first glance, appears to be a many-many relationship, which necessitates the use of an intermediary relationship table. For instance, I have three accounts of my own at my bank. In addition, my wife has two of her own. Finally, we have a shared account. The schema above could not well handle such relationships.
You could, indeed, just use "Name" - but you may need to know what the first or last names are at some point in the future and such a concatination can be quite problematic to split.
Good luck with your homework...
The problem is that you haven't presented us with what the database should represent in words; as it is now, there's nothing "wrong" with the design, since we don't know what the design is supposed to model.
I certainly wouldn't say that CustID is useless, as it serves as the primary key of the table. What you need to determine is the relationship between customers and accounts. It should be one of the following:
A single customer can be tied to multiple accounts, but a single account can be tied to a single customer
A single customer can be tied to only one account, but an account can be tied to multiple customers.
A single customer can be tied to multiple accounts, and a single account can be tied to multiple customers
Right now, with AccNumber in the Customer table, your design models #2.
How is is designed right now, each customer could only have one bank account.
The many-to-many relationship will be a problem. Instead, you might create a third table that holds the relationships. For example:
Account = {AccNumber, Type, Balance}
Connection = {ConnID, AccNumber, CustID}
Customer = {CustID, FirstName, LastName, Address}
This way, both Account and Customer are parented by Connection (for lack of a better name). You could query all connections with a certain AccNumber and find all the customers using that account, and vice versa.
I'm designing a schema for a learner management system.
I currently have LearnerDetails table which stores below categories of information.
- login user account details
- contact details and home address
- learner's residency related information including nationality info, current visa details to remain in UK etc
- learner's current state benefit related information
- details about learner's current employment status
The problem that I have is, when all these information are represented in a single table, number of columns exceed 70 columns.
One thing that I can to do is, I can segregate information in to different tables representing the categories mentioned above and associate these tables to their parent table LearnerDetails as 1:1 relationships.
I'd like to know whether this is a recommended approach or not.
In my opinion 1:1 relationships would represent a database what is over normalized. But if I didn't do this, it would result in having a huge horizontal table as my LearnerDetails table.
Highly appreciate if you could let me know your opinions/suggestions.
There is nothing inherently wrong with many columns in a table, as long you have 5NF, or at least 3NF.
But, there are quite a few examples where vertical partitioning (1::1) makes sense -- take a look at a similar question.
How wide are the columns? If your record is wider than the page size then having one wide table is a performance propblem waiting to happen.
Address is generally NOT a 1-1 relationship with person. Yes most people only have one but that is not true of everyone. Students for instcne sometimes live part time with each of their divorced parents. I would suggest that address be separated out. If you store phone numbers, those two are generally not in a 1-1 relationship. You might have a cellophone a fa xnumber a business number and a home phone (landline) number. Anything that hasa good possibility of eventually needing to be in a one-many relationship should be separated out from the start.
If you do separate out the tables and want to enforce the one-to-one relationship, yuo can either use the id from the parent table as the PK inthe child table or have a differnt Pk for the table and set-up a unique index for the FK field. Do not set-up a one-to-one realtionship without a way to enforce it in the database.
There is no problem at all to have 70 or more columns, if that's what normalisation requires. You did not mention which rdbms you use, but most suport at least 255 fields.
Currently my users table has the below fields
Username
Password
Name
Surname
City
Address
Country
Region
TelNo
MobNo
Email
MembershipExpiry
NoOfMembers
DOB
Gender
Blocked
UserAttempts
BlockTime
Disabled
I'm not sure if I should put the address fields in another table. I have heard that I will be breaking 3NF if I don't although I can't understand why. Can someone please explain?
There are several points that are definitely not 3NF; and some questionable ones in addition:
Could there could be multiple addresses per user?
Is an address optional or mandatory?
Does the information in City, Country, Region duplicate that in Address?
Could a user have multiple TelNos?
Is a TelNo optional or mandatory?
Could a user have multiple MobNos?
Is a MobNo optional or mandatory?
Could a user have multiple Emails?
Is an Email optional or mandatory?
Is NoOfMembers calculated from the count of users?
Can there be more than one UserAttempts?
Can there be more than one BlockTime per user?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then it indicates a problem with 3NF in that area. The reason for 3NF is to remove duplication of data; to ensure that updates, insertions and deletions leave the data in consistent form; and to minimise the storage of data - in particular there is no need to store data as "not yet known/unknown/null".
In addition to the questions asked here, there is also the question of what constitutes the primary key for your table - I would guess it is something to do with user, but name and the other information you give is unlikely to be unique, so will not suffice as a PK. (If you think name plus surname is unique are you suggesting that you will never have more than one John Smith?)
EDIT:
In the light of further information that some fields are optional, I would suggest that you separate out the optional fields into different tables, and establish 1-1 links between the new tables and the user table. This link would be established by creating a foreign key in the new table referring to the primary key of the user table. As you say none of the fields can have multiple values then they are unlikely to give you problems at present. If however any of these change, then not splitting them out will give you problems in upgrading the application and the data to support the application. You still need to address the primary key issue.
As long as every user has one address and every address belongs to one user, they should go in the same table (a 1-to-1 relationship). However, if users aren't required to enter addresses (an optional relationship) a separate table would be appropriate. Also, in the odd case that many users share the same address (e.g. they're convicts in the same prison), you have a 1-to-many relationship, in which case a separate table would be the way to go. EDIT: And yes, as someone pointed out in the comments, if users have multiple address (a 1-to-many the other way around), there should also be separate tables.
Just as point that I think might help someone in this question, I once had a situation where I put addresses right in the user/site/company/etc tables because I thought, why would I ever need more than one address for them? Then after we completed everything it was brought to my attention by a different department that we needed the possibility of recording both a shipping address and a billing address.
The moral of the story is, this is a frequent requirement, so if you think you ever might want to record shipping and billing addresses, or can think of any other type of address you might want to record for a user, go ahead and put it in a separate table.
In today's age, I think phone numbers are a no brainer as well to be stored in a separate table. Everyone has mobile numbers, home numbers, work numbers, fax numbers, etc., and even if you only plan on asking for one, people will still put two in the field and separate them by a semi-colon (trust me). Just something else to consider in your database design.
the point is that if you imagine to have two addresses for the same user in the future, you should split now and have an address table with a FK pointing back to the users table.
P.S. Your table is missing an identity to be used as PK, something like Id or UserId or DataId, call it the way you want...
By adding them to separate table, you will have a easier time expanding your application if you decide to later. I generally have a simple user table with user_id or id, user_name, first_name, last_name, password, created_at & updated_at. I then have a profile table with the other info.
Its really all preference though.
You should never group two different types of data in a single table, period. The reason is if your application is intended to be used in production, sooner or later different use-cases will come which will need you to higher normalised table structure.
My recommendation - Adhere to SOLID principles even in DB design.
I am currently in the process of looking at a restructure our contact management database and I wanted to hear peoples opinions on solving the problem of a number of contact types having shared attributes.
Basically we have 6 contact types which include Person, Company and Position # Company.
In the current structure all of these have an address however in the address table you must store their type in order to join to the contact.
This consistent requirement to join on contact type gets frustrating after a while.
Today I stumbled across a post discussing "Table Inheritance" (http://www.sqlteam.com/article/implementing-table-inheritance-in-sql-server).
Basically you have a parent table and a number of sub tables (in this case each contact type). From there you enforce integrity so that a sub table must have a master equivalent where it's type is defined.
The way I see it, by this method I would no longer need to store the type in tables like address, as the id is unique across all types.
I just wanted to know if anybody had any feelings on this method, whether it is a good way to go, or perhaps alternatives?
I'm using SQL Server 05 & 08 should that make any difference.
Thanks
Ed
I designed a database just like the link you provided suggests. The case was to store the data for many different technical reports. The number of report types is undefined and will probably grow to about 40 different types.
I created one master report table, that has an autoincrement primary key. That table contains all common information like customer, testsite, equipmentid, date etc.
Then I have one table for each report type that contains the spesific information relating to that report type. That table have the same primary key as the master and references the master as well.
My idea for splitting this into different tables with a 1:1 relation (which normally would be a no-no) was to avoid getting one single table with a huge number of columns, that gets very difficult to maintain as your constantly adding columns.
My design with table inheritance gave me segmented data and expandability without beeing difficult to maintain. The only thing I had to do was to write special a special save method to handle writing to two tables automatically. So far I'm very happy with the design and haven't really found any drawbacks, except for a little more complicated save method.
Google on "gen-spec relational modeling". You'll find a lot of articles discussing exactly this pattern. Some of them focus on table design, while others focus on an object oriented approach.
Table inheritance pops up in a few of them.
I know this won't help much now, but initially it may have been better to have an Entity table rather than 6 different contact types. Then each Entity could have as many addresses as necessary and there would be no need for type in the join.
You'll still have the problem that if you want the sub-type fields and you have only the master contact, you'll have to know what table to go looking at - or else join to all of them. But otherwise this is a workable solution to a common problem.
Another possibility (fairly similar in structure, but different in how you think of it) is to simply put all your contacts into one table. Then for the more specific fields (birthday say for people and department for position#company) create separate tables that are associated with that contact.
Contact Table
--------------
Name
Phone Number
Address Table
-------------
Street / state, etc
ContactId
ContactBirthday Table
--------------
Birthday
ContactId
Departments Table
-----------------
Department
ContactId
It requires a different way of thinking of things though - instead of thinking of people vs. companies, you think of the various functional requirements for the task at hand - if you want to send out birthday cards, get all the contacts that have birthdays associated with them, etc..
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you should rethink your normalization strategy (as you seem to be lucky enough to be able to rethink your schema quite fundamentally). If you typically store an address for each contact, then your contact table should have the address fields in it. Alternatively if the address is stored per company then the address should be stored in the company table and your contacts linked to that company.
If your contacts only have one address, or one (or even 3, just not 'many') instance of the other fields, think about rationalizing them into a single table. In my experience having a few null fields is a far better alternative than needing left joins to data you aren't sure exists.
Fortunately for anyone who vehemently disagrees with me you did ask for opinions! :) IMHO you should only normalize when you really need to. Where you are rethinking schemas, denormalization should be considered at every opportunity.
When you have a 7th type, you'll have to create another table.
I'm going to try this approach. Yes, you have to create new tables when you have a new type, but since this table will probably have different columns, you'll end up doing this anyway if you don't use this scheme.
If the tables that inherit the master don't differentiate much from one another, I'd recommend you try another approach.
May I suggest that we just add a Type table. Ie a person has an address, name etc then the student, teacher as each use case presents its self we have a PersonType table that has an entry from the person table to n types and the subsequent new tables teacher, alien, singer as the system eveolves...