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POUnnecessary Redundancy with Tables
 

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    <p>My items are listed as follows; This is just a summary of course. But I'm using a method shown for the "Detail" table to represent a type of 'inheritence', so to speak - since "Item" and "Downloadable" are going to be identical except that each will have a few additional fields relevant only to them. </p> <p>My question is in this design pattern. This sort of thing appears many, many times in our projects - is there a more intelligent way to handle it? I basically need to normalize the tables as much as possible. I'm extremely new to databases and so this is all very confusing to me. </p> <p>There are 5 items. Awards, Items, Purchases, Tokens, and Downloads. They are all very, very similar, except each has a few pieces of data relevant only to itself. I've tried to use a declaration field (like an enumerator 'Type' field) in conjunction with nullable columns, but I was told that is a bad approach. What I have done is take everything similar and place it in a single table, and then each type has its own table that references a column in the 'base' table. </p> <p>The problem occurs with relationships, or junctions. Linking all of these back to a customer. Each type takes around 2 additional tables to properly junction all of the data together- and as such, my database is growing very, very large. Is there a smarter practice for this kind of behavior?</p> <pre><code>Item ID | GUID Name | varchar(64) Product ID | GUID Name | varchar(64) Store | GUID [ FK ] Details | GUID [FK] Downloadable ID | GUID Name | varchar(64) Url | nvarchar(2048) Details | GUID [FK] Details ID | GUID Price | decimal Description | text Peripherals [ JUNCTION ] ID | GUID Detail | GUID [FK] Store ID | GUID Addresses | GUID Addresses ID | GUID Name | nvarchar(64) State | int [FK] ZipCode | int Address | nvarchar(64) State ID | int Name | varchar(32) </code></pre>
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