meichner (10/10/2008)
...Since I know that I always have to have one Detail Item for each Master and that almost all of the time that there is only one Detail item, would it be a good or bad idea if the Master table contained the fields FieldA and FieldB? This way I would only have to concern myself with the Detail table on rare occassions?
Personally, I don't think it's good design, but that's just my opinion. Were you just looking to save the cost of the join between the master table and the detail table? If you made the clustered index on the detail table be the MasterID and the SequenceNumber, it should be fairly efficient. If you did put FieldA and FieldB in the master table, what mechanism would you use to be able to determine if your query needs to look in the detail table? I'd think that those queries would be much more inefficient than just doing the simple join to begin with.