Re: Is supertyping orthadox?

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001 12:28:04 -0000, "Brett Gerhardi" <brett.gerhardi_at_trinite.co.uk> wrote:
>We've had initial design discussions with a firm of consultants and during
>this came up the issue of how do we store the services data.
>
>The solution they came up with was what they termed as a 'generic table
>structure' where basically there is a 'schema' table that stores the Field
>name, data type, length, (also has a foreign key to a 'tables' table to
>group the schemas together). Also there is a 'values' table that has a
>foreign key to the 'schema' table that in the implentation would have a
>sql_variant field that stored the data.

See if these guys can even recite the definitions of the first three normal forms. They can't. Fire them.

Your design sounds completely orthodox, theirs is completely weinie.

Read any book on relational design, for gosh sakes. If their design made any kind of sense, databases wouldn't let you define your own tables. Sheesh.

J. Received on Tue Mar 20 2001 - 19:57:13 CET