Help Designing Relational Database

[kirk112]

Hi

 

I am trying to design an article website and have got a mental block over the best way to design the database, I have attached a screenshot of the current design (please ignore the column types), I will try to best explain the problem below, please let me know if you need any additional information

 

An article can be in any number of categories (article_to_category table) all the articles have set values which are stored in the article_content. Depending on the type of the article it can have additional attributes which are stored in the report, article, event, viewpoint tables.

 

The problem is there is not direct link between the article_content table and the attributes in the above tables, I would have to union all the tables together and workout which of the values I need to display.

 

I have looked at a EAV model and feel it's not the correct way to go. I have thought about combining the report, article, event, viewpoint tables into the article_content and making the column NULL but this feels 'wrong'.

 

Thanks for your advice, please let me know if you need any further explanation

 

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[fenway]

Why don't those additional tables have an article_uid?

[kirk112]

Thanks for the reply,

 

They all have a article_content_id, and if I select an article from report, article, event or viewpoint I will be able to join the article content and other related information, but if I do a search on the article_content table I will not know which table to join to it as it can be 1 of 4

 

Regards

 

[fenway]

But that's always the case, whether it's 1 table or 4 -- you can't know what's in the other table until you look.