What if, like Amazon, a customer can have more than one address on file? Then you make "addresses" a separate table with one-to-many relationship.
So then you're making affiliates (or clients, or distributors) and you realize it would be nice to re-use the fields you already have there in the "addresses" table, even though the affiliate's address is one-to-one, NOT a one-to-many. Would it be bad design to have different foreign keys, as shown below? Is this a bad idea? Should I just re-type the address field definitions directly into the affiliates table, since it's not one-to-many? create table customers ( id serial primary key, name varchar(64) ); create table affiliates ( id serial primary key, name varchar(64) ); create table addresses ( id serial primary key, customer_id int REFERENCES customers(id), affiliate_id int REFERENCES affiliates(id), addr1 varchar(64), addr2 varchar(64), city varchar(64), state varchar(12), postalcode varchar(12), country char(62), CONSTRAINT needs_link CHECK (customer_id IS NOT NULL OR affiliate_id IS NOT NULL) ); ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])