Database Design for updatable sequential records

Question

I am working on creating a data model for storing data related to production tracking. I work for an engineering firm that models and analyzes data for our clients. There are several steps in the process and the process is constantly updating.

I am trying to model the processes and include parent processes and sequential order of processes.

For example:

Process Table
---------------------
ProcessID - uniqueidentifier
ProcessName - varchar
ProcessDescription - varchar
...

ProcessOrder Table
---------------------
ProcessID - uniqueidentifier FK - Process
ParentProcessID - uniqueidentifier FK - Process
ProcessOrder - int
...

The ProcessOrder column in the ProcessOrder Table would simply store a number representing which sequential step in the parent process it represents.

For example, a modeling procedure has the following steps: create new empty model, name model, enter model parameters. The Process Table would look like:

ProcessID | ProcessName | ProcessDescription
-------------------------------------------------
UUID1     | Modeling    | Create Model of Data
UUID2     | New Model   | create new empty model
UUID3     | Name Model  | name model
UUID4     | Parameters  | enter model parameters

The ProcessOrder Table would look like:

ProcessID | ParentProcessID | ProcessOrder
--------------------------------------------------
UUID2     | UUID1           | 1
UUID3     | UUID1           | 2
UUID4     | UUID1           | 3

The issue with this design is that when the workflow gets updated, the process order will change and I will need to update the ProcessOrder record for the process that changed and for all subsequent records with the same ParentProcessID.

Is there a better way to store this kind of data and maintain normalization?

Answer 1

Your design seems reasonable to me. While you do have to update all subsequent records when new processes are added or deleted that is easy to accomplish. You just issue an update like:

UPDATE ProcessOrder
SET ProcessOrder = ProcessOrder+1
WHERE ProcessOrder >= [step# where you want to insert]

and then do your insert or delete.

The only other way I can think of would be to design the schema to store the next process id on the row. Something like:

ProcessID | ParentProcessID | NextId
--------------------------------------------------
UUID2     | UUID1           | UUID3
UUID3     | UUID1           | UUID4
UUID4     | UUID1           | NULL

Then if you insert a new step - say between UUID3 and UUID4, you perform more of a linked list operation which will update UUID3|UUID1's NextId to UUID5 and then just insert the new UUID5 with a NextId of UUID4.

This will reduce the UPDATEs to 1 in most cases, but it will make querying the process more difficult as now you have to walk the list from top to bottom to list out step by step.

You need to decide which process you want to favor - inserting and updating or retrieving. If you favor retrieval (which you might if changes are infrequent and reporting is frequent, and the lists are short), then go with your original design. If you favor insert and update (which you might if changes are happening all the time and reporting is infrequent, or lists are really really long), then go with the linked list approach.

I hope this helps. Interested in what other solutions the community might come up with as I'd love to broaden my knowledge around this!

Answer 2

If all you need is to store which step of your process comes after which previous step, then all you need is the following:

ProcessID | ParentProcessID | PreviousProcessID

Of course, you will need a FK constraint to make sure that (ParentProcessID | PreviousProcessID) points to a valid (ParentProcessID | ProcessID)

If I understood your requirements and this design is valid, then it is easy to insert/remove/move around steps in your process - you do not have to propagate any changes to your child tables, because they refer to your primary key on (ParentProcessID | ProcessID).

HIH

Answer 3

Couple of questions first...

1. Why are you going to use unique identifiers as your key columns? I see this done often in databases and I'm never sure why. If you truly need a record to be unique throughout the entire database, or even across multiple systems/databases it's perfectly fine. However, if that's not the case and you just need the record to be unique in the table then use an integer value. Even if you have to use a BIGINT you'll be better off; a BIGINT type is 8 bytes whereas a UNIQUEIDENTIFIER is stored as a 16 byte binary string.
2. What does the workflow look like at the application level in relation to updating the process order? The reason I ask is because you might be able to avoid multiple UPDATE statements if you can store everything in local memory until the workflow is complete. For example, if the front end application is an ASP.NET Web application you could store everything in Session State, allow users to complete the entire workflow, and then perform a single database operation.
3. Is it possible that multiple users will be working components of the same process workflow concurrently? If so, you will need to put checks in place that ensure two users cannot step on each other's toes.
4. What about a process history for auditing and reporting? If you update records then you will completely lose all of the history. You'll never be able to present a report that shows the different process steps, the time it took to move from one to the other, etc.

Three and four above can be solved by inserting records for every single change instead of updating records. This will obviously create a ton of additional data, but it will also give you a ton of additional insight into the workflow itself and eventually provide information that can be used for trending, PKI's and other business intelligence, which brings us to data warehousing... But that's another post.

Answer 4

The process step is not meaningful in your case unless a process version is defined. So you could say that process 1 has its steps executed in this order (a, b , d, c) when the process was in version 1, but in version 2 the step execution order changed to be (a,b,c). So I think that a process version is important.

The diagram below represents my suggestion.

The silly thing about this is that if you change the order of a step, you have to insert all steps again in the new order, but in this case, it won't matter either in space or time.