Just in need of a bit of advice.

I'm currently building a database to store information about different
products. Currently about 350 products with 12 different product
ranges (i.E Publications, Clothing etc)

The decision I have to come to is I have about 6 fields which apply
only to certain product ranges I.E 6 out of the 12 and the problem i
have is that in some cases all 6 fields apply to a x number of product
ranges, sometimes 4 fields will apply to a smaller number of ranges
and in other cases only one field applies to one specific category.

What I'm trying to decide is would it be better to put all of the six
fields in one seperate table to then link to the main table of data or
seperate the fields out into seperate tables for the differnet product
categories they apply to. The later method would mean the same type of
field defined in numerous tables, the former would mean i would end up
with some empty fields.


Brain is going numb as it's been a long time since i did DB design so
any views/help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Hi:

In the days of 250 Gig drives for next to nothing, I'd just have the
fields in all the records. Yes, you are wasting space, but you are
simplifying your forms design and coding.
I would be sure to default the fields to 0 or " ", rather than leaving
them as Nulls.

Good luck
Ira Solomon

On 21 Mar 2005 07:27:07 -0800, be_insane (AT) yahoo (DOT) com (Bex) wrote: