Have you considered one large table with all of the columns from the various spreadsheets, then a separate view for each customer?
----- Original Message ---- From: Mike Diehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 12:29:15 PM Subject: [GENERAL] Design question Hi all, I've got a design question that I need to ask before I go too far down what might be the wrong road. I've got a customer, who has multiple customers, who need to be able to upload an excel spreadsheet into Postgres. Then they want to be able to slice and dice that data. The problem is that probably none of these spreadsheets will have the same fields in them. There are two ways to do this, that I can think of... 1. Create a table for each spreadsheet, using column headings as field names. Every field would be a char/varchar. We might have a table to track which client owns which table. This could amount to 10's of tables being added to the db. 2. Create a table in which we store individual cells and associate them with an owner. Then each client would essentially have one (huge?) table that they can work with. Design #1 is easy to implement, but might make management more difficult. Design #2 is easy to manage, but the SQL needed to generate reports would be "tricky." I'm intending to provide a report generator, so the complexity of the reporting SQL can be mitigated. So, which road should I travel down? TIA, -- Mike Diehl -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
