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Just Visiting wrote:
> Apologies for my lack of knowledge of Oracle terminology... it's not my
> thing. I'm an SQL type. But a question about general Oracle design...
>
> I administer a network that uses an Oracle db put together by a third party.
> We're currently running out of disc space on the main data volume on that
> server. I have various issues with the structure of the db that they're
> using (i.e. it's badly non normalised) but one specific question that I
> have...
>
> There are various tables that need 'notes' fields. Long free-text type
> things. For (a brief, cut down) example, you have customers and you have
> contacts with those customers. Each of those entities might require notes.
> The way that I would set that up would be a 'notes' field on each table.
> The way that my 3rd party company is using is to have a single table (called
> Notes) with a sequential key field. Each of the tables Customers and
> Contacts has a numeric field: 0 means that there are no notes, a numeric
> value means that there's a corresponding record in Notes. At the last
> count, we had notes for about 15 live tables stored in this one table.
>
> This is breaking db normalisation rules... but is there a reason to do it
> this way because it's being stored in Oracle?
There are reasons. None of them are good.
BTW: When asking questions about Oracle ... version is important.
-- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan_at_x.washington.edu (replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)Received on Tue Apr 19 2005 - 01:23:40 CDT