Category Types

From: George R. <gringro1_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 17 Jun 2003 11:52:54 -0700
Message-ID: <d3ffc970.0306171052.27c74f1d@posting.google.com>

Are category types a bad database design methodology? For example, a person, company, or bank can own a car. To represent this scenario, I created the following entities: PERSON, COMPANY, BANK, OWNER, and CAR. The OWNER table contains a surrogate key and a type attribute which could be either a person, company, or bank. So the entities looks like the following:

Person
personID, fname, lname, ownerID

Company
companyID, fname, lname, ownerID

Bank
bankID, fname, lname, ownerID

Owner
ownerID, type

Car
year, make, model, ownerID

Thank you,
gr Received on Tue Jun 17 2003 - 13:52:54 CDT