Re: database design question

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

One table name PERSON. Anything else is a denormalized nightmare.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)


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