I am looking at a new database design for the association I belong to. In
particular I am looking at how to handle telephones, addresses, and email.
All of these could have zero to as many as five values for any of the
entities. Our society has the following entities with examples of address
types following.
Society (Site, Mailing, Billing, Contact)
District (Contact, Mailing, Secretary)
Region (Contact, Mailing)
Chapters (Contact, Mailing, Billing,Meeting)
Members (Home, Business, Althome)
Every entity has a globally unique numeric ID. I am looking at an address
table with the following columns.
EntityID, Address1,Address2,Address3,City, State,Zip,Country,AddressType
I am doing the same thing for telephone and email address. As a webmaster
I
have three email addresses I want to expose.
The old design has a single table per entity with a very wide record.
There
are two sets of addresses possible, three telephones, and three emails.
Most of the columns have little data in them.
I've gotten some comments that I have too many tables and performance will
suffer. From the design literature I think I am headed in the right
direction.
Comments?
Keith
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