Re: Design question regarding data typing

Bob Hairgrove wrote:
> It does sound like an awkward design to me. For example, both schools
> and banks have a physical address, or location, as well as one or more
> mailing addresses and a variety of phone and fax numbers, e-mail, etc.
> So do ordinary people. And there might some day be an additional new
> entity with the same attributes. Therefore, I would keep the address
> and phone data, etc. in separate tables.
This is what I'm already doing.

> If you are more interested in modelling a map with longitude and
> latitude, perhaps modelling the physical property (i.e. real estate),
> then you would typically try to abstract the schools and banks as
> specializations of a base type, perhaps "building". The usual way of
> modelling this would be to have a table of buildings, schools and
> banks. The schools and banks tables would have a 1-to-1 foreign
> constraint on the primary keys, e.g.:
Again, this is what I'm doing. It's just that I call my table "Institutions" instead of "Buildings". Received on Fri Feb 24 2006 - 15:56:47 CET