Joel Brown

4,135 reputation

1619

bio	website	mooseware.ca
	location	Mississauga, Canada
	age	50
visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
	seen	7 hours ago
stats	profile views	132

I'm a professional software developer with more than twenty years of experience across many industries and the entire systems development lifecycle. I'm the principal consultant at Mooseware Limited.

@joelabrown

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	4,135 reputation	bio	website	mooseware.ca	visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
1619 badges		location	Mississauga, Canada		seen	7 hours ago

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Jun 14	comment	Configuration Persistance Design @eversor - Jon of All Trades is correct (+1). Configuration settings belong in a configuration settings table, or outside of the database. Where you are going wrong is in thinking that the number of notifications needed is an attribute of `Notifications`. This is, in my opinion, one of the reasons why it is bad to use plural nouns for table names in general. The `Notifications` table is not the place to put everything about notifications, it is the place to store a set of individual notification records. Your setting is an attribute of the system user, not of notifications.
Jun 11	answered	How should I model an “either/or” relationship?
Jun 8	awarded	Constituent
Jun 8	awarded	Caucus
May 1	comment	Inventory database structure when inventory items have varying attributes @Vidar - I used Visio with ERD smartshapes that I created to use the James Martin visual conventions and drawn with a custom line pattern that is sketchy. I find this is a good tool to use for quick/draft data models. When the diagram is too formal it can lead some people to think it's finished, so something sketchy helps to prevent people from jumping to conclusions about how firm/finished a data model is.
May 1	answered	schema analyzer tool
Apr 29	answered	Weak entity and one-one or many-many relationship
Apr 28	answered	What is a common way to save 'debit' and 'credit' information?
Apr 27	comment	Having multiple refs in an intersection table Thanks Leigh - I like your answer too (+1) - This is a good illustration of the schema subtype idea applied to OP's situation.
Apr 27	comment	Having multiple refs in an intersection table @Vidar - I wouldn't rule out Oracle Object Type, but it is really more of a programming tool rather than a database schema tool, insofar as it incorporates program logic (e.g. PL/SQL) as well as data structure. When I use the terms supertype and sub-type, it is from a data modeling perspective Leigh Riffel has a good answer that illustrates what my answer is suggesting.
Apr 27	answered	Having multiple refs in an intersection table
Apr 21	answered	Design question about student assessment data
Apr 19	comment	Handling growing number of Tenants in Multi-tenant Database Architecture I haven't had to deal with a situation like this, but my intuition would be to handle the tenant rollout by preconfiguring servers with as many tenant databases as you think they can handle and then just assign the pre-built tenant databases as new tenants sign up. This way you don't have to worry about resource contention while deploying tenant DBs at least.
Apr 19	awarded	database-design
Apr 18	answered	Supertype/Subtype deciding between category: complete disjoint or incomplete overlapping
Apr 18	answered	Human relations between users
Apr 14	comment	What is the name of this schema pattern +1 for nice description of the application of data warehouses and the distinction between operational and analytic reporting. "Spurious reconcilliation bunfights" is worth +1 by itself.
Apr 14	answered	What is the name of this schema pattern
Apr 6	comment	How to create a train schedule in SQLite3? Might you also consider adding another parent to `Train_Run` to account for equipment used? I only think of this to distinguish your `Train` table as denoting logical routes as opposed to physical trains. +1 for a good design regardless.
Apr 4	comment	Survey database design: associate an answer to a user @VansFannel - The attribute notes in the ERD are just non-trivial (or non-obvious) columns in the tables. I expect that you'd guess where to put IDs, FKs, descriptions, etc. For `sequence` I'm suggesting that you'll need/want to control the order in which items are displayed. For `value` I'm pointing out that a user-entered value (not just an option selection) may be appropriate.