Database Design Question

SQLServerCentral is supported by Red Gate Software Ltd.

Popular Topics

Home

Members

Calendar

Who's On

Home » Database Design » Design Ideas and Questions » Database Design Question

13 posts, Page 2 of 2

««1 2

Database Design Question

Rate Topic

Display Mode

Topic Options

Author

Message

Matt Miller (#4)

Posted Wednesday, November 28, 2007 8:06 AM

SSCertifiable

Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: 2 days ago @ 8:45 PM
Points: 7,002, Visits: 13,999

Jeff Moden (11/28/2007)

Once that were accomplished, then I believe there would be no need for separate tables or databases for each Location. Simply add the LocationID to most of the tables. Properly indexed, I don't believe performance or scalability will even come close to being an issue.

Agreed - once you update your relations (or th right subset of your relations) to be compound relations to include the old FK to now be FK+locationID, you should be able to have all of the separation you need. I'm still not clear on where it fits in precisely, because the requirements are a bit fuzzy, but this works fairly well.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?

Post #426910

David Burrows

Posted Wednesday, November 28, 2007 10:13 AM

SSCertifiable

Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Today @ 1:47 AM
Points: 6,375, Visits: 5,427

OK. I'll go to the bottom of the nerd's class Sad

See if this works better

There are locations (Dealers) that represent a Car Dealership that sells cars. The code for the dealer is varchar(10) containing 6 numeric digits where thr first 3 are zero (eg 000123) this I cannot change due to external systems however it is possible to convert the last 3 digits to int but this would constrain the system if this ever changes but I am prepared to accept this for an easier solution

At these locations, a Dealership enter details of a Contact they will be making with a Customer, e.g. name, telephone details etc
Associated with this contact is:-
a SalesExecutive (or Sales Person if you like) at that Dealership
an Outcome (Sale, Lost Sale etc)
the Source of the contact (Direct Mail, Local Awareness etc)
the Model (of car) the are interested (at this time Dealerships can enter their own description not sure if this will change to dedicated central list)
the type of Contact (Walk-in, Telephone etc)

Dealerships will maintain their list of names of SalesExecutives, Models etc

p.s. This data is currently held discreetly at Dealerships and will be in future stored centrally

Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.

Anon.

Post #426969

Jeff Moden

Posted Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:22 PM

SSC-Dedicated

Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Yesterday @ 9:01 PM
Points: 33,111, Visits: 27,037

You could probably get away with the VARCHAR location ID.

On the other, consider this... what does a dealer need most? Customers? What would a dealer need to trend customers? Customer information. You need to be able to track repeat customers, customers that buy more than one vehicle/model in the same transaction (usually business/fleet customers), and the occasional person who says "I'd buy one today if you had a blue one" (cross dealer sales).

Given the revelation about your scenario, yeah, I think I'd split the SalesExecutive (employee) table from the Contact (customer) table. But, I'd still relieve/normalize the Contact table as I've previously mentioned. This is not only a sales tracking system, it's a customer management system. The cross-reference table would help meet all current and many future needs. I don't believe that denormalization of the Contact table is correct even though there's a very specific purpose you currently have in mind... you have to be able to let it grow and support new requests for information without much (if any) change to the underlying tables. Why? Makes you look good as a Designer and that's good for repeat business and referrals. Plan for the unexpected and keep the tables normalized.

--Jeff Moden

"RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for "Row-By-Agonizing-Row".

First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
Stop thinking about what you want to do to a row... think, instead, of what you want to do to a column."

For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

For better answers on performance questions, click on the following...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQLServerCentral/66909/

Post #427035

« Prev Topic | Next Topic »

13 posts, Page 2 of 2

««1 2

Permissions