Product families

From: Adie <arsehinge_at_h-o-t-m-a-i-l.com>
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 20:39:56 GMT
Message-ID: <fa8f94bb0fceab35c944fb9a0594a1be_at_news.teranews.com>

Hi, wonder if anyone can aid me with a database design.

The database is for a manufacturing company who produce several hundred products, each of which can be classified into families; tubes, shapes, tapes etc.. Each product has certain properties depending on what the product is, so a tube will have inside/ouside diameter, length, expansion ratio whilst a tape will have a separate set of properties.

Now I may be missing something here but it seems to me that I need a table for each product family combined with a 'lookup' table based on product id and family id.

This means I'll be using SQL to find the family id, and then use code in my app to point the next query at the correct family table to gain the real product info.

Now I'm no genius but this approach seems somewhat inelegant to me, and I feel sure there must be a type of schema knocking about which is ideal for this kind of db design. If so can anyone point me towards the docs. Thanks! Received on Thu Jan 08 2004 - 21:39:56 CET