Re: Any new thoughts on OTLT (One True Lookup Table)

jinglebells5555_at_yahoo.com says...

> I found a discussion in the archives that was a couple of years old.
> I'm one man development team working on a small website. I'm designing
> a database that will have scores of lookup tables and I'm thinking it
> will be much quicker for me to have one "generic" one than 40
> individual ones that are almost completely identical except for the
> content.

This makes no sense. If you have "things" that you want to lookup that are similar (title - Mr., Mrs., Rev., Col., Miss, Fr.) whatever, then it makes sense to keep those similar entities in the same table (obviously "sameness" will to an extent be defined by the application), but what is the problem with having lots of small tables rather than one large (and potentially messy) table?  

> Since I'm using postgres I've also thought about using inheritance but
> that ties me to postgres.
 

PostGres, schmostGres...AcCess, schmacCess it doesn't matter what RDBMS you are using. You keep similar things together, different things arpart.

Paul...  

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