You may want to have several tables linked by foreign keys. A Census Tract table, a County table, a State table, etc.
That reduces the amount of duplicate data and the chances for inconsistent entries. The downside is a bit more work on the part of the computer to do lookups, but particularly if your typical use case accesses one or a few at a time (say 1% of a big table) then the performance hit for joins etc is minimal. Design your normalized schema, then write a standalone Python program to stuff the initial data into the tables. Good luck! - Tom > On Jan 10, 2018, at 5:20 PM, Tom Tanner <dontsendemailher...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hey everyone, > > I have a bunch of text files that each have a bunch of columns in common. I > plan to import these files into PostgreSQL tables. The website user will be > able to send a GET request to query a table and get back data from it. Since > most of the tables will have a bunch of columns in common, how should I > structure them in my `models.py`? > > Here's a couple examples of tab-delimited text files I'll import. > > NAME S1903_C02_001E state county tract State-County-Tract-ID > Census Tract 201, Autauga County, Alabama 66000 01 001 020100 01001020100 > Census Tract 202, Autauga County, Alabama 41107 01 001 020200 01001020200 > Census Tract 203, Autauga County, Alabama 51250 01 001 020300 01001020300 > > > > and > > NAME S1903_C02_001F S1903_C02_001G state county tract > State-County-Tract-ID > Census Tract 201, Autauga County, Alabama 66000 4040 01 001 020100 > 01001020100 > Census Tract 202, Autauga County, Alabama 41107 192837 01 001 020200 > 01001020200 > Census Tract 203, Autauga County, Alabama 51250 39482 01 001 020300 > 01001020300 > > > As you can see, they have several columns in common. I wouldn't want to > repeat myself in `models.py` by listing the same columns over and over. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Django users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > <mailto:django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. > To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com > <mailto:django-users@googlegroups.com>. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-users > <https://groups.google.com/group/django-users>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-users/e5fc9dab-c0aa-4fb8-a66c-5f507a18f4b6%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-users/e5fc9dab-c0aa-4fb8-a66c-5f507a18f4b6%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-users. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-users/BBE685A9-02DF-4FE9-94D1-7B4871B64C90%40gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
