Re: Table design - reducing number of entities

Or use a hash in the table to overload the common attributes (in other words, serialize them; Ruby on Rails uses yml data, but obviously others can be used as well). This allows you to store inheritance in the table. This obviously must be done judiciously, but I believe also strikes a middle ground instead of pulling tables out of a hat. For readability to someone else looking at the table structure, it also becomes apparent that an inheritance action is happening. Hopefully anyway.

That said, I agree that some abstractions make for nasty table structures, but many times developers don't generalize correctly in the first place. I agree in the education realm -- it would do many developers good to learn what BCNF is.

And being the primary database guy on my programming squad, some of the database structures I see never cease to amaze me. I believe, also, that some of the structures are afterthoughts of a finite-state machine already dreamed up by the developer. They are never thought out all the way as to reportability, let alone being in 3nf.

~ AE ~
frugalprogrammer.com [because technology shouldn't hurt] Received on Fri Dec 02 2005 - 03:24:26 CST