Re: database design question

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 12:30:31 -0700, "gkelly" <gkelly_at_xmission.com> wrote:

>I have a database for a school that has been in use now for a couple of
>years and it is working well.
>
>There are numerous tables obviously but consider these:
>Contact - holds all contacts - students, faculty, or any other type of
>contact - (probably should have called it Entity)
>Faculty - holds info about specific faculty member - foreign key to
>contact
>Student - holds info about specific student - foreign key to contact
>-----------
>
>Considering that the contact table has fields such as: last, first, mi,
>addr, city, state, zip, email ...
>
>Do you think it is a good idea to have a single table hold such info. Or,
>would you have had the tables Faculty and Student store
>the last, first, addr and other fields?
>
>At what point do you de-normalize for the sake of being more practical?

In general when performance becomes an issue.

>
>gkelly
>
Received on Thu Jan 06 2005 - 21:35:54 CET