Re: Planning A Database

  • From: "Bill Gallik" <BillGallik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 09:54:50 -0600

Hi Jim,
Which DBMS engine are you planning to use? (not that that matters much as regards your question)
You certainly can plan as you go; that's called growability in my book (not published of course). Here's the thing; I'd make sure to add at least one "dummy" field in any given record format just in case you eventually need to create an auxiliary table to hold additional information for a given record in an original table.
For example; suppose you have a customer information table where each record is made of key, first name, middle name, last name, address1, address2, state or province, postal code and telephone number. Suppose you wind up wanting to add a cell phone number per customer; it would be great if you had added an additional field to serve as the key into another table that listed various cell phone numbers (just a basic example). And because we know that some folks have more than one cell phone account that key could be a non-unique identifier to relate that customer record to one or more cell phone numbers.
Of course, this can be expanded to ridiculous complexity, but hopefully this will give you some ideas about how to design an expandable database. 

----
Holland's Person, Bill
- "Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
- US Humorist, Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 
__________
View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. programmingblind
  3. Archive
  4. 03-2010