[thelist] DB Schema Design

[Hershel Robinson]

> Well, the basic answer is that in my opinion you're using a single table
> to describe unrelated attributes of different entity classes; in other
> words you're merging three unrelated tables into one, just because they
> happen to share a similar name.

This is an excellent point.

> You're merging product_status, order_status and customer_status into one
> table, then adding a redundant field so you can find out which original
> table you're querying on.

Interesting way to view it.

> As I understood it the reason for suggesting this was that you had 
> subsets of the 17 tables which would all share the same class of status 
> values, is this not right?

I don't think so actually. This point has never been discussed but the 
way the schema is now, each state has one and only one 'class' which 
means it is applicable to either products or customers or users, but not 
more than one type of record.

> * See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=borked. I was using 
> the term in context of the second definition, as it turns out, and it 
> wasn't meant unkindly.

I really didn't know that such a word was known to the world. It doesn't 
appear to be terribly popular where I live anyhow. :)

Thanks,
Hershel

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