you need to flesh out more requirements. sit down with him and ask alot of
questions. bring a laptop with you and use excel. everything he says he
wants try to isolate as a requirement.
you need to sit with your customer and get more information. this is too
vague.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Giovanni Cuccu"
To: "ORACLE-L"
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 8:29 AM
Subject: OT: Database design question
> Hi all,
> a customer asked me for a "generic store" database. The term
> generic means that the database should be able to store variuos kind
> of items. An example could be an IT hardware shop where you can buy
> computers, printers, routers, etc. For each item the db should store
> the different parts (i.e. the data for a PC must contains the cpu
> type, hard disks, RAM installed, os type, etc)
> I was coming to the conclusion that the design that seems to solve the
> problems is something like this (I list the tables with their meaning)
> items contains item id, item_type and descrption
> items_metadata contains every possible attribute for each item_type
> items_attributes contains the item attributes (CPU, RAM,etc)
> attributes_metadata contains the attribute definition
> This is just the basic idea; the main problem (at least for me) is
> that a simple query like:
> give me all computers with WinXP and 512MB RAM
> involves a self join or the use of analytics.
> I googled for
> database design part
> database design inventory
> database design store
> database design warehouse
> but I did not found a different solution.
> Since I think this is a very common design problem does anyone has
> some reference or advice?
> Thanks a lot
> Giovanni
>
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Received on Mon Jan 09 2006 - 15:40:37 CST
