Re: database design question

No, I do not 'need' to denormalize this. and I don't want to change it just for the sake of change.

What would you do when you want to close out one year and start a new year. If you had standalone student and faculty tables then you could archive them easily. Have a school semester and year attached to them.

However, as you go go from one year to the next infomation about a student or faculty may change. Like their addr and phone for example. The database model now is not very good because it doesnt maintain a history. If Student A was in school last year as well but lived somewhere else
would you have 2 contact records? 2 student records? or do you have just one of each and have a change log. which is best?

gkelly

"Impulsive" <sigenest_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1105042366.622564.240920_at_c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> My question is - why do you need to denormalize this?
> Are there heavy reports being run on this data that don't execute fast
> enough?
> What kind of reports?
> What other info is in faculty and student tables besides foreign keys?
>
>
> gkelly 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?
>>
>> gkelly
>
Received on Thu Jan 06 2005 - 21:40:54 CET