CODEWITHSUNDEEP
postgresqldatabase-design
Deepak Tyagi
Deepak Tyagi

Reputation: 85

Do i really need individual table for my three types of users?

If i have three type of users. Let's say seller, consumers, and sales persons. Should i make individual table for there details like name, email passwords and all other credentials etc with a role_type table or separate table for each of them. Which is the best approach for a large project considering all engineering principles for DBMS like normalization etc.

Also tell me Does it effect the performance of the app if i have lots of joins in tables to perform certain operations?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 64

Answers (2)

Neville Kuyt
Neville Kuyt

Reputation: 29629

It sounds like this is a case of trying to model inheritance in your relational database. Complex topic, discussed here and here.

It sounds like your "seller, consumer, sales person" will need lots of different attributes and relationships. A seller typically belongs to a department, has targets, is linked to sales. A consumer has purchase history, maybe a credit limit, etc.

If that's the case,I'd suggest "class table inheritance" might be the right solution.

That might look something like this.

create table user_account
(id int not null, 
username varchar not null, 
password varchar not null
....);

create table buyer
(id int not null, 
user_account_id int not null(fk), 
credit_limit float not null, 
....);

create table seller
(id int not null, 
user_account_id int not null(fk),
sales_target float,
....);

To answer your other question - relational databases are optimized for joining tables. Decades of research and development have gone into this area, and a well-designed database (with indexes on the columns you're joining on) will show no noticeable performance impact due to joins. From practical experience, queries with hundreds of millions of records and ten or more joins run very fast on modern hardware.

Upvotes: 1

user330315
user330315

Reputation:

If the only thing that distinguishes those people is the role but all details are the same, then I would definitely go for a single table.

The question is however, can a single person have more than one role? If that is never the case, then add a role_type column to the person table. Depending on how fixed those roles are maybe use a lookup table and a foreign key, e.g.: 

create table role_type
(
   id integer primary key,
   name varchar(20) not null unique
);

create table person
(
  id integer primary key, 
  .... other attributes ..., 
  role_id integer not null references role_type
);

However, in my experience the restriction to exactly one role per person usually doesn't hold, so you would need a many-to-many relation ship

create table role_type
(
   id integer primary key,
   name varchar(20) not null unique
);

create table person
(
  id integer primary key, 
  .... other attributes ..., 
);

create table person_role
(
  person_id integer not null references person, 
  role_id integer not null references role_type, 
  primary key (person_id, role_id)
);

Upvotes: 2

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