Oracle FAQ Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid
HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US
 

Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.misc -> Re: Notes fields

Re: Notes fields

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 23:23:40 -0700
Message-ID: <1113891598.998763@yasure>


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

Original text of this message

HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US