I am beginning work on a suite of small projects, which all feed off of a
central database. I have an idea rolling around in my mind as to the DB
design, but am not sure whether to go ahead with it. I'm trying to stay away
from zillions of small tables, each representing something different, so
here's what I came up with:
Break everything down into "objects". Every user is an object. Every message
board is an object. Every message on a board is an object. These can all be
stored together in one table.
Every object has a "type", such as USER, MESSAGEBOARD, MESSAGE, etc. These
too can be stored in one table.
Every type of object has a list of attributes available to it. This table
would show that an object of type USER has attributes FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME,
PASSWORD, etc.
The last table contains the actual data for the attributes defined above. It
shows that a particular user's LastName is 'Smith'. The next record in this
table could specify that a particular message was written at 11:30 PM.
Now the question: Am I insane? Has anyone tried something like this before?
It is definitely an experiment in DB normalization, but I don't want to work
on it for 3 weeks, then find myself swamped.
Hopefully this makes sense. Any foresight you may have would definitely be
appreciated.
Norman Elton
Information Technology
College of William & Mary
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