The following is a message from a fellow programmer to a group of use that
are involved in table design:
"We are planning on creating 'account opening sources' lookup table to
store
'account source' codes and corresponding descriptions. Problem with
storing
this data in a dedicated table is that as we go on we'd end up with tens
and
possibly hundreds of lookup tables.
I suggest that instead we create a more generic table that stores various
codes used within a schema, along with corresponding description and a
code
'category'. Another table (optional but recommended) would contain
'category' descriptions.
This is not my idea, I've seen this approach used at other companies.
Please see attached for an illustration.
Let me know what you think."
I'd like to know how other companies do this. Do you have a separate
table
for each set of codes or do you have one table with basically three
columns:
code_category, code_value, code_description (or just catagory, value,
description)?
Thanks for any insight.
Frank
