Re: Design question regarding data typing

Sure. I was trying to explain that one column of my Insitutions table was the foreign key InstitutionTypeId which indexes the name (and description) of the type of institution (which in this simplification can be either "school" or "bank"). I have this in addition to separate Banks and Schools tables. The reason for using the InstitutionType descriptor (or as I gather it's called from Roy's post above, "discriminant") is so that if I want summary instituition data from Insitutions I can easily figure out the institution type without having to scan for each InstutionId foreign key of interest in Banks Schools. And that's the kludge that's causing me such consternation. :-( It just reeks of bad form.

Am I making any sense?

Anyway, Bob. Thanks much for your help here. I do highly apprecaite it. :-)

Jacob Received on Fri Feb 24 2006 - 18:39:43 CET