Simple Design Question...I think

[Guest]

I have a people table and company table. Each person and each company can
have multiple telephone numbers. With respect to a telephone table(s), should
I have two tables, a people telephone table and a company telephone table; or
one table and have a 'Type' field to distinguish if its a people number of a
company number?

One point is that I do need to keep the order of the telephone numbers so
there is a notion of a primary number and secondary number...etc. One query I
will be needing is to pull only the primary number (if there is one) from the
telephone table in a Join with the people (or company) table. It worries me
how the Type field will be used with this type of Join.

Thanks for any input

JJBJr

 

[Allen Browne]

Take a look at:
People in households and companies
at:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~allenbrowne/AppHuman.html

The article suggests placing the individuals and companies into one Client
table, even though you may want to use different forms to interface them.
That solves the problem of telephone numbers and lots of other related data.