I have some experience getting data out of database, but not so much in design. To work on this, I'm taking some personal projects and trying to create them in access. I've run across an issue that I was able to get a solution to, but I find it clumsy and was hoping to have some opinions on what I can do better.
My current project is a monthly budget. At this stage I would like a Form to appear as follows:
Category
Sub-Category Budget_Amount
Sub-Category Budget_Amount
Category
Sub-Category Budget_Amount
etc.
I found that I can do this if all the sub-categories are the fields in a table and the category names are hard-coded as labels in the form. However, I would like my table structure to be like this:
Category:
ID
Category_Name
Sub-Category:
ID
Sub-Category
ID_Category
Show_Category
Budget:
Id
Sub-CategoryID
Budget_Amount
The reason I want this structure is that not all sub-categories will be used every month, and in my mind it will be easier to match what was budgeted verses what was spent. I am also trying to practice minimizing space taken up by the database. Are there any ways to do this easily? Or am restricted to my current solution?
I would dive into normalization principles first as you seem not to be too familiar on those principles yet.
"The reason I want this structure..." is not a good reason at all.
Your basic is a sound normalized database structure.
I'd suggest you structure your tables like this:
tblCategory -> CatID (autonumber PK), Categorie
tblSubCategory -> SubCatID (autonumber, PK), CatID (number, FK), Subcategory
As for budgets, I'd expect that budgets tie in into projects. There's no logical reason to tie in budgets directly into any kind of category.
We would need more and escepially more explicit information on what you're trying to achieve.
Similar question:
Database Design Question - Categories / Subcategories
There's sites that could help you to start understanding designing in MS Access, for instance
http://www.functionx.com/access/index.htm
Related
I've a requirement to design a database for an ecommerce app that has vast scope of product categories ranging from pin to plane. All products have different kinds of features. For example, a mobile phone has specific features like memory, camera mega pixel, screen size etc whilst a house has land size, number of storeys and rooms, garage size etc. Such specific features go on and on as much as we've products. Whist all have some common features, there are mostly very different and specific features of all. So, it has gotten bit confusing while designing its database. I'm doing it for the first time.
My query is about database design. Here is what I'm planning to do:
Create a master table with all fields, that tells if a field is common or specific and map them with respective category of the product. All products will have "common" fields but "specific" will be shown only for one category.
table: ALL_COLUMNS
columns:
id,
name,
type(common or specific),
category(phone, car, laptop etc.)
Fetch respective fields from all_columns table while showing the fields on the front.
Store the user data in another table along with mapped fields
table: ALL_USER_DATA
columns:
id,
columnid,
value
I don't know what is the right way and how it is done with established apps and site. So, I'm looking forward if someone could tell if this is the right way of database architecture of an ecommerce app with highly comprehensive and sparse set of categories and features.
Thank you all.
There are many possible answers to this question - see the "related" questions alongside this one.
The design for your ALL_USER_DATA table is commonly known as "entity/attribute/value" (EAV). It's widely considered horrible (search SO for why) - it's theoretically flexible, but imagine finding "airplanes made by Boeing with a wingspan of at least 20 metres suitable for pilots with a new qualification" - your queries become almost unintelligible really fast.
The alternative is to create a schema that can store polymorphic data types - again, look on Stack Overflow for how that might work.
The simple answer is that the relational model is not a good fit for this - you don't want to make a schema change for each new product type your store uses, and you don't want to have hundreds of different tables/columns.
My recommendation is to store the core, common information, and all the relationships in SQL, and to store the extended information as XML or JSON. MySQL is pretty good at querying JSON, and it's a native data type.
Your data model would be something like:
Categories
---------
category_id
parent_category_id
name
Products
--------
product_id
price
valid_for_sale
added_date
extended_properties (JSON/XML)
Category_products
-----------------
category_id
product_id
Being new to relational database design, I am trying to clarify one piece of information to properly design this database. Although I am using Filemaker as the platform, I believe this is a universal question.
Using the logic of ideally having all one to many relationships, and using separate tables or join tables to solve these.
I have a database with multiple products, made by multiple brands, in multiple product categories. I also want this to be as scale-able as possible when it comes to reporting, being able to slice and dice the data in as many ways as possible since the needs of the users are constantly changing.
So when I ask the question "Does each Brand have multiple products" I get a yes, and "Does each product have multiple brands" the answer is no. So this is a one to many relationship, but it also seems that a self-join table might give me everything that I need.
This methodology also seems to go down a rabbit hole for other "product related" information such as product category, each product is tied to one product category, but only one product category is related to a product.
So I see 2 possibilities, make three tables and join them with primary and foreign keys, one for Brand, one for Product Category, and one for Products.
Or the second possibility is to create one table that has the brand and product category and product info all in one table (since they are all product related) and simply do self-joins and other query based tables to give me the future reporting requirements that will be changing over time.
I am looking for input from experiences that might point me in the right direction.
Thanks in advance!
Could you ever want to store additional information about a brand (company URL, phone number, etc.) or about a product category (description, etc.)?
If the answer is yes, you definitely want to use three tables. If you don't, you'll be repeating all that information for every single item that belongs to the same brand or same category.
If the answer is no, there is still an advantage to using three tables - it will prevent typos or other spelling inconsistencies from getting into your database. For example, it would prevent you from writing a brand as "Coca Cola" for some items and as "Coca-Cola" for other items. These inconsistencies get harder and harder to find and correct as your database grows. By having each brand only listed once in it's own table, it will always be written the same way.
The disadvantage of multiple tables is the SQL for your queries is more complicated. There's definitely a tradeoff, but when in doubt, normalize into multiple tables. You'll learn when it's better to de-normalize with more experience.
I am not sure where do you see a room for a self-join here. It seems to me you are saying: I have a table of products; each product has one brand and one (?) category. If that's the case then you need either three tables:
Brands -< Products >- Categories
or - in Filemaker only - you can replace either or both the Brands and the Categories tables with a value list (assuming you won't be renaming brands/categories and at the expense of some reporting capabilities). So really it depends on what type of information you want to get out in the end.
If you truly want your solution to be scalable you need to parse and partition your data now. Otherwise you will be faced with the re-structuring of the solution down the road when the solution grows in size. You will also be faced with parsing and relocating the data to new tables. Since you've also included the SQL and MySQL tags if you plan on connecting Filemaker to an external data source then you will definitely need to up your game structurally.
Building everything in one table is essentially using Filemaker to do Excel work and it won't cut it if you are connecting to SQL, MySQL, etc.
Self join tables are a great tool. However, they should really only be used for calculating small data points and should not be used as pivot points or foundations for your reporting features. It can grow out of control as time goes on and you need to keep your backend clean.
Use summary and sub-summary reporting features to slice product based data.
For retail and general product management solutions, whether it's Filemaker/SQL/or whatever the "Brand" or "Vendor" is it's own table. Then you would have a "Products" table (the match key being the "Brand ID").
The "Product Category" field should be a field in the "Products" table. You can manage the category values by building a standard value list or building a value list based on a "Product Category" table. The second scenario is better for long term administration.
So I have this application that I'm drawing up and I start to think about my users. Well, My initial thought was to create a table for each group type. I've been thinking this over though and I'm not sure that this is the best way.
Example:
// Users
Users [id, name, email, age, etc]
// User Groups
Player [id, years playing, etc]
Ref [id, certified, etc]
Manufacturer Rep [id, years employed, etc]
So everyone would be making an account, but each user would have a different group. They can also be in multiple different groups. Each group has it's own list of different columns. So what is the best way to do this? Lets say I have 5 groups. Do I need 8 tables + a relational table connecting each one to the user table?
I just want to be sure that this is the best way to organize it before I build it.
Edit:
A player would have columns regarding the gear that they use to play, the teams they've played with, events they've gone to.
A ref would have info regarding the certifications they have and the events they've reffed.
Manufacturer reps would have info regarding their position within the company they rep.
A parent would have information regarding how long they've been involved with the sport, perhaps relations with the users they are parent of.
Just as an example.
Edit 2:
**Player Table
id
user id
started date
stopped date
rank
**Ref Table
id
user id
started date
stopped date
is certified
certified by
verified
**Photographer / Videographer / News Reporter Table
id
user id
started date
stopped date
worked under name
website / channel link
about
verified
**Tournament / Big Game Rep Table
id
user id
started date
stopped date
position
tourney id
verified
**Store / Field / Manufacturer Rep Table
id
user id
started date
stopped date
position
store / field / man. id
verified
This is what I planned out so far. I'm still new to this so I could be doing it completely wrong. And it's only five groups. It was more until I condensed it some.
Although I find it weird having so many entities which are different from each other, but I will ignore this and get to the question.
It depends on the group criteria you need, in the case you described where each group has its own columns and information I guess your design is a good one, especially if you need the information in a readable form in the database. If you need all groups in a single table you will have to save the group relevant information in a kind of object, either a blob, XML string or any other form, but then you will lose the ability to filter on these criteria using the database.
In a relational Database I would do it using the design you described.
The design of your tables greatly depends on the requirements of your software.
E.g. your description of users led me in a wrong direction, I was at first thinking about a "normal" user of a software. Basically name, login-information and stuff like that. This I would never split over different tables as it really makes tasks like login, session handling, ... really complicated.
Another point which surprised me, was that you want to store the equipment in columns of those user's tables. Usually the relationship between a person and his equipment is not 1 to 1 and in most cases the amount of different equipment varies. Thus you usually have a relationship between users and their equipment (1:n). Thus you would design an equipment table and there refer to the owner's user id.
But after you have an idea of which data you have in your application and which relationships exist between your data, the design of the tables and so on is rather straitforward.
The good news is, that your data model and database design will develop over time. Try to start with a basic model, covering the majority of your use cases. Then slowly add more use cases / aspects.
As long as you are in the stage of planning and early implementation phasis, it is rather easy to change your database design.
I am searching for a guideline on how to set up my database for a auction side.
My problem is, that there is a lot of different product types - let's say paintings, clothes, computers etc. They have different specifications, and it should be possible to set just Product A in size L on auction - or the whole stock of Product B e.g.
How should I build my database for optimal performance - and coding - in this case?
I would suggest the following database/object structure:
[Auction] n..1 [Category] 1..n [Variation Attribute] 1..n [Attribute Value]
An auction then has a category and several attribute values referring the variation attribute as well:
[Auction] = [Category], [Name], [Description]
[Auction_AttrVal] = [AuctionID], [VarAttrID], [AttrValID]
First of all you can have some kind of category table, which holds items like "Paintings", "Clothes", "Computers". An auction / product is assigned to one category.
Each category then defines variation attributes for this specific category. An example would be "Size" for the category "Clothes" or "CPU" for the category "Computers". You can also add predefined values for the variation attributes to limit the number of variations and avoid differentiations like "3GhZ" vs "3 GhZ".
This mechanism also allows for easy filtering of search results. You select a category and simply load all variation attributes as filters (or add a flag to an attribute to declare it as such) and offer the values for filtering to the end-user.
Furthermore you can make variation attributes for a category mandatory to force users who create the auctions (I'm assuming it's Consumer-to-Consumer) to provide sufficient information for their auction.
The code will probably be quite generic and simple. The database structure is highly flexible and extensible. Performance is much better than having all in one table. You probably should create an index (for the field AuctionID) for the Auction_AttrVal table. Please let me know if the database structure is not explained properly.
I have an Access application, in which I have an employee table. The employees are part of several different levels in the organization. The orgranization has 1 GM, 5 department heads, and under each department head are several supervisors, and under those supervisors are the workers.
Depending on the position of the employee, they will only have access to records of those under them.
I wanted to represent the organization in a table with some sort of level system. The problem I saw with that was that there are many ppl on the same level (for example supervisors) but they shouldn't have access to the records of a supervisor in another department. How should I approach this problem?
One common way of keeping this kind of hierarchical data in a database uses only a single table, with fields something like this:
userId (primary key)
userName
supervisorId (self-referential "foreign key", refers to another userId in this same table)
positionCode (could be simple like 1=lakey, 2=supervisor; or a foreign key pointing to another table of positions and such)
...whatever else you need to store for each employee...
Then your app uses SQL queries to figure out permissions. To figure out the employees that supervisor 'X' (whose userId is '3', for example) is allowed to see, you query for all employees where supervisorId=3.
If you want higher-up bosses to be able to see everyone underneath them, the easiest way is just to do a recursive search. I.e. query for everyone that reports to this big boss, and for each of them query who reports to them, all the way down the tree.
Does that make sense? You let the database do the work of sorting through all the users, because computers are good at that kind of thing.
I put the positionCode in this example in case you wanted some people to have different permissions... for example, you might have a code '99' for HR employees which have the right to see the list of all employees.
Maybe I'll let some other people try to explain it better...
Here's an article from Microsoft's Access Cookbook that explains these queries rather well.
And here is a somewhat chunky explanation of the same.
Here's a completely different method (the "adjacency list model") that you might find useful, and his explanation is pretty good. He also points out some difficulties with both methods (when he talks about the tables being "denormalized").