Table Design Question (1 Viewer)

[ledgerr.rob]

Access 2007
Windows Vista

I'm working on creating a DB that will help keep track of the family heirlooms in our family. I've built it around each of the 'items.'

My question arises around the original 'ownership' and the current 'steward' for each of the items. The owner and steward would have the same information stored potentially so I decided to put them in the same table (tblOwner).

I guess my first question is this a good approach? They are related to the tblItem with a PK and FK structure. I could create a second table for the steward, but does this make for a good normalized design?

I've attached an image of the design related to this question.


Thanks for any comments,
rob

 

[MarkK]

In general I think of a table as storing instances of real-world things, one thing for each row. In this sense Owner is not a great table name since ownership is more like a status or a dimension of a thing, rather than a thing itself. I would expect a table called Heirloom maybe, and a table called Person. Then the ownership dimension of the Heirloom object is a single field, maybe called OwnerID, that links to a row in the Person table. And then you have a one-to-many relationship in that one person may own many Heirlooms, so various rows in Heirloom might contain the OwnerID of the same person.

 

[ledgerr.rob]

thanks lagbolt for the response and info. I like your naming suggestions. Removing the OwnerID and StewardID and replacing with PersonID is a good idea.

If i understand what you correctly, storing information for the two types of people (original owner and current steward) in the same table is appropriate to keep a normalized structure?