Re: Designing a structure for a personal database

On Apr 26, 9:33 am, David Segall <da...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I have decided to rewrite a couple of applications that use my
> personal information database and I'm looking for ideas on how to
> structure a new database for them.
>
> For most purposes I want to communicate with a family or business at
> its "home" address. For example, "Fred and Betty Bloggs" or "Acme
> Widgets" have a specified street address and telephone number. It is
> possible that the Bloggs family has a holiday house or I have to deal
> with Acme Widgets at more than one location. I also need information
> about individuals such as mobile phone numbers and birthdays but I
> don't want to duplicate shared home and business addresses and
> telephone numbers. For example, Betty Bloggs could work for Acme
> Widgets and share a town house and a country house with Fred.
>
> Please ignore any database structure implied in the preceding
> paragraph. I'm looking for the ideal PIM database structure and you
> probably understand the requirements better than I do.

Sorry, but my crystal ball has been broken for quite some time. Only
you know the requirements for your project. What I would suggest is
that you study database modeling for a bit before beginning to write
the program and database. Look up ERD - Entity Relation****p Diagrams
Pick a couple sites that are university based and read the materials.

And always keep in mind that sometimes the same requirements may
result in different designs from different developers Some of the
differences will be merely style differences and others will be
functional differences in areas not detailed in the requirements. As
they often say in the PERL programmers group, there's more than one
way to do it.

Finally, to give you a hint, I would approach this by making
addresses  a separate entity, Then both person and business entities
can reference the address entity (e.g. allows a home business) I'll
let your discover the entity you'll need to allow multiple addresses.
(it is not hard.)


>    ...   No doubt you
> have been frustrated by the address books in many applications that
> insist you supply all the details for every individual.
>
> My excuse for posting in comp.lang.java.databases is that I follow it
> and the applications will be written in Java and use Derby as the
> database. I confess that the reason is to canvas a wider audience but
> I refuse to admit the post is spam.

ERD development is independent of the DBMS as long as the DBMS is
relational. Using JAVA you may fall into some of the Object Oriented
thinking that sometimes  corrupts the relational design. So think
about your DB design carefully.

HTH,
   Ed