Database Administrators Asked by ProGrammer on December 31, 2020
The database I am designing is part of a project I am working on. I have come up with 3 simple “business rules”:
I have come up with the following design based on the above requirements:
However, there is a problem with normalization.
In order for the 3rd requirement to be met, I am saving the shipping address into the Order at the time of creation. Additionally, I am referencing an address in the Customer table (which is potentially the same).
In the bottom right of the image, I extracted the Address-related attributes into its own table as the first step in my attempt to normalise the design.
Over the past week, I have searched for hints without much luck.
I know about this post and this one, yet the implementation is rather ambiguous for my scenario/case.
The thought of making a single table with all addresses, then referencing each as required has crossed my mind but doesn’t seem like the right (let alone best) way of achieving this goal.
My question is simple:
How do I meet the 3rd requirement of associating an address with a Customer and an Order historically, with normalisation in mind?
Any help is very much appreciated. Cheers.
You have addresses in 3 tables. Shrink that down to 1. Then have a customer_address_id
in the Customers
table and ship_address_id
in the Orders
table. Then, ship_address_id
can be nullable. Do not make all the fields in Addresses
Nullable. (Perhaps region
and/or post_code
can be left blank -- but make them DEFAULT ''
instead of NULLable
.
If a Customer is 'shipping' to himself, simply copy the customer_address_id
into Orders.ship_address_id
.
One more thing... In order to not lose "old addresses", be careful about when (if ever) you change any row in Addresses
. You may end up with unused entries, but that is a small price to pay for the data integrity you require.
Answered by Rick James on December 31, 2020
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