>-----Original Message----- >From: metastable [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 8:49 AM >To: mysql >Subject: normalised designs: customer database > [JS] My first suggestion, and I am entirely sincere, is that you use either an off the shelf solution or an external service. I inherited a home-grown system and it is a perpetual pain in the neck. It never has done what we really need to do, although it's been getting closer.
In a former life I was a consultant, and I always discouraged customers from building when buying would suffice. Of course, every company in the world has unique needs - or so they claim. :-(. 2) create the customer table with a column specifying if we're dealing >with a human being or a company [JS] I recommend this. >3) create the customer table with a FK for people and a FK for >companies, and decide on the customer type in the application based on >the presence of that key > [JS] I'm not sure why you need a foreign key. Surely you won't be entering customers using the MySQL CLI client on a routine basis, so your user interface could (and should) be responsible for checking the data. If you really feel the need to constrain the data, define the column as a set. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
