I am designing an alumni mailing list database is 20,000 or so entries. I have received some conflicting advice about how much to normalize my DB. I have two types of "objects", people and institutions. People could be alumni, employees, affiliate, etc. Institutions could be schools, businesses, etc. I was advised to condense all of these possibilities into the two categories above. Now I am at a cross-roads where I must decide if I should be clever and have only one table holding addresses for both categories (people and institutions - 3NF of course) or if I should have an address table for 'people' and an address table for 'institutions'. This decision will apply to other tables besides 'address' such as e-mail, phone, etc.
While both implementations will work, I feel like one must be much less efficient than the other. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Dave
While both implementations will work, I feel like one must be much less efficient than the other. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Dave