Re: Help me to design this table

mich dobelman wrote:
> I am developing web site to compare coupons.
> we will have all information from yahoo, ecoupon.com and couponshopping.com.
> The following tables shows the Denny's coupon avaiable from three sites
> from ecoupon.com you have Free Drink, yahoo 2 for 1, and couponshopping 10%
> accordingly.
>
> Shop Master Table
> | shop_id | ecoupon_id | yahoo_id | couponshopping_id | shop_name |
> shop_address
> | 1 | ec00001 | yh00001 | cs00001 |
> Denny's | 1233 Georgia Ave.
>
> Coupon Master Table
> | id | coupon_id | coupon_content |
> | 1 | ec00001 | Free Drink |
> | 2 | yh00001 | 2 For 1 |
> | 3 | cs00001 | 10% OFF |
>
> The problem I am facing now is that what if I add another site handle
> coupons say EbayCoupon.com
> but uses similar id like ec00001. How can I optimize this table so that the
> data won't be duplicated and normalized for the best performance but still
> be able to compare the coupons from multiple web sites.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> MD

What's the first rule of normalization? Isn't it to eliminate repeating elements? Beyond that, if you are using 'ec00001' to identify a coupon from ecoupon, why would you want to also use it to identify a coupon from EbayCoupon?

It looks like you're designing your tables before you've analyzed your data and identified your entities and properties. What are your entities? Looks like stores (Denneys, Applebees, etc) coupons, and coupon issuers/sources (yahoo, ecoupon, couponshopping). I leave the rest as an exercise for the student. Received on Tue Aug 29 2006 - 08:38:24 CDT