Question: Entities With Common Attributes

Thanks in advance for any suggestions offered:

All right, I *thought* I understood database modelling and SQL, until the following arose:

What is the "accepted way" of handling something like this ?

A database model for a company sales obviously contains an entity "customer"

But, in this case, there are 2 types of customer - "businesses" and "individuals"
Different attributes are recorded for each type

eg: something like:

Individual-Customer

    Customer-number
    Name
    Phone-no
    Driving-Licence-number

Business-Customer

    Customer-number
    Business-name
    Business-type

So, the customer-number is the only attribute common to both types of customer
But, I don't see how that ought to be handled

I'm probably missing something very obvious here... Could someone give me a hint as to what it is ?

novice SQL-er ( still learning ) Received on Wed Apr 04 2001 - 06:20:50 CEST