Re: Question on Structuring Product Attributes

Derek Asirvadem wrote:

> On Oct 5, 4:24 am, -CELKO- <jcelko..._at_earthlink.net> wrote:
>> [snip]
>
> Joe
>
> If I may ask, is this method of implementing RI for Exclusive Subtypes
> one of your original concepts (like the Nested Sets), or is it someone
> else's or general practice or whatever ?

Surprisingly to me, Joe is advocating what I would have suggested. It is entirely respectable, though it may not be all that common.

The common approach is to just cram everything into one table with lots of nullable attributes to hide the conflation of fact types, then leave the whole mess under the carpet so that the application code has to figure out the real business model at run-time, every time.

Explicit support for distributed key constraints in SQL would make the approach properly robust plus it would, in my opinion, have the psychological benefit of pointing the way and comforting us that we're doing it right.

-- 
Roy