CODEWITHSUNDEEP
databaseerd
Yoope
Yoope

Reputation: 2195

redesign an ERD

Hey I need to redesign the Customer table shown below.

So I want the redesigned ERD to allow a Customer to be either an individual or an organization (so maybe I need a new attribute called OrganizationName?) .

And each individual customer should have their Email recorded, but an organization may leave the Email column blank.

I've been thinking about how I should redesign it for a few hours and still could not find any good approaches.

So does anyone here have any ideas?

Thanks

enter image description here

Upvotes: 1

Views: 61

Answers (1)

Paul Sasik
Paul Sasik

Reputation: 81449

If you want to keep it really clean your Customer table could contain just two foreign keys, one to a Person table and one to an Organization table. Only one of the foreign keys would be populated and the other null.

Doing it this way means extra tables and relationships but saves you from overloading a single table to handle two different types of entities.

Upvotes: 1

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