you need to flesh out more requirements. sit down with him and ask alot of
questions. bring a laptop with you and use excel. everything he says he
wants try to isolate as a requirement.
you need to sit with your customer and get more information. this is too
vague.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Giovanni Cuccu" <giovanni.cuccu@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "ORACLE-L" <Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 8:29 AM
Subject: OT: Database design question
Hi all, a customer asked me for a "generic store" database. The term generic means that the database should be able to store variuos kind of items. An example could be an IT hardware shop where you can buy computers, printers, routers, etc. For each item the db should store the different parts (i.e. the data for a PC must contains the cpu type, hard disks, RAM installed, os type, etc) I was coming to the conclusion that the design that seems to solve the problems is something like this (I list the tables with their meaning) items contains item id, item_type and descrption items_metadata contains every possible attribute for each item_type items_attributes contains the item attributes (CPU, RAM,etc) attributes_metadata contains the attribute definition This is just the basic idea; the main problem (at least for me) is that a simple query like: give me all computers with WinXP and 512MB RAM involves a self join or the use of analytics. I googled for database design part database design inventory database design store database design warehouse but I did not found a different solution. Since I think this is a very common design problem does anyone has some reference or advice? Thanks a lot Giovanni
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