June 18, 2003 at 5:53 am
I'm curious what type of design recommendations anyone would have under the following circumstances. We have come up with several solutions, none of which are perfect. The design we are currently considering is as follows:
We have two distinct companies but many operations overlap and both are in the same industry (transportation). Most users need access to data from both companies, but not in all cases. We have debated about creating a Common database that would contain tables such as Companies, States (AL, PA, etc.) and other commonly used tables. We would then have two Master databases named after each company that would contain tables like Trucks, Drivers, Customers, etc (This would allow us to have only one location to make modifications or additions to). Each application then would generally have it's own database with tables that access data for each company generally specific for that application. Each table would have the same schema to aid in reporting (Crystal Reports) although some fields for one company may have all NULL values.
All data access would be done through stored procedures.
One of our concerns is keeping referential integrity across databases, since many of the tables in the application databases would reference both the Master Company databases and the Common database.
If anyone has a better design or suggestions, I'd like to hear them. Thanks.
Tom
June 18, 2003 at 6:04 am
Hey, Tom, we had a good discussion about this back in November. Here's the thread on it; you might find some good opinions...
June 24, 2003 at 4:44 am
Thanks, very helpful.
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