Data modeling for a multi-company product
From: dawn <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com>
Date: 23 Jan 2007 13:38:41 -0800
Message-ID: <1169588320.942055.219390_at_j27g2000cwj.googlegroups.com>
One feature of some ERP and other software application systems is the ability for the customer site to indicate in the setup which attributes are required and which are not related to the various data entry
"screens." So, customer A might consider birthdate to be a required
"field" when a user is entering data into the XYZ screen/form while
customer B does not.
Date: 23 Jan 2007 13:38:41 -0800
Message-ID: <1169588320.942055.219390_at_j27g2000cwj.googlegroups.com>
One feature of some ERP and other software application systems is the ability for the customer site to indicate in the setup which attributes are required and which are not related to the various data entry
"screens." So, customer A might consider birthdate to be a required
"field" when a user is entering data into the XYZ screen/form while
customer B does not.
When I was reading about designing for the elimination of NULLs, it struck me that I was not sure how to prepare an elegant logical data design if the exact same software is to be deployed to multiple customer sites with the customer having this option. This means that other than "primary keys" (those used to create new or lookup existing information) almost all attributes are optional.
How do SQL-based ERP solutions and other software to be deployed to
multiple companies model the data for this feature? Do any ERP or
other multi-company software solutions come close to doing this
"properly" with no nullable attributes? Do they then have a separate
Thanks. --dawn Received on Tue Jan 23 2007 - 22:38:41 CET