Notes fields

Apologies for my lack of knowledge of Oracle terminology... it's not my thing. I'm an SQL type. But a question about general Oracle design...

I administer a network that uses an Oracle db put together by a third party. We're currently running out of disc space on the main data volume on that server. I have various issues with the structure of the db that they're using (i.e. it's badly non normalised) but one specific question that I have...

There are various tables that need 'notes' fields. Long free-text type things. For (a brief, cut down) example, you have customers and you have contacts with those customers. Each of those entities might require notes. The way that I would set that up would be a 'notes' field on each table. The way that my 3rd party company is using is to have a single table (called Notes) with a sequential key field. Each of the tables Customers and Contacts has a numeric field: 0 means that there are no notes, a numeric value means that there's a corresponding record in Notes. At the last count, we had notes for about 15 live tables stored in this one table.

This is breaking db normalisation rules... but is there a reason to do it this way because it's being stored in Oracle? Received on Mon Apr 18 2005 - 18:36:44 CDT