database design question

From: gkelly <gkelly_at_xmission.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 12:30:31 -0700
Message-ID: <crk3ko$im3$1@news.xmission.com>

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 - 13:30:31 CST