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Old 05-10-2008, 02:06 PM
jerryji
 
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Default Effective DB Design Question

Hi DB Gurus,

Excuse me for raising this question not strictly on pgsql.

As a simplified example, the schema products(productid INTEGER, price
REAL, for_region GEOM, warranty_till DATE, package_byte INTEGER) is
not efficient for a company that produces both cars and software
because cars won't need package_byte column while software won't need
for_region column. In a real life case, the superset could have tens
of thousands of products with tens of hundreds of different attributes
that any product will only be applicable to a small fraction of them.

Is it possible to design an effective schema for this?

Many thanks in advance!

Jerry
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