[Shacs] database structure question.. this one is easy

[Hartness, Ken]

An external defaults table has one drawback.  Changes to the actual tables of judges, etc., may not be reflected naturally in the defaults table.  Personally, I think associating an extra frequency/probability field with entries would be a cool way of handling it.  Just select the max or sort them into a drop-down list.

Note:  didn't have time to view the models considered, so I don't know what I'm talking about.  Later.
--
Ken T. N. Hartness, Ph.D.
Computer Science Undergraduate Advisor
Sam Houston State University
________________________________
From: shacs-bounces at shsu.edu [shacs-bounces at shsu.edu] On Behalf Of Fuermann, Jason [JBF005 at shsu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:41 AM
To: 'Bronius Motekaitis'; shacs
Subject: RE: [Shacs] database structure question.. this one is easy

For the list to see. Also I guess I should have noticed you were populating the trial/hearing table, I was thrown off by the naming schema on the first example. I promise to pay more attention next time.

From: Fuermann, Jason
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:11 AM
To: 'Bronius Motekaitis'
Subject: RE: [Shacs] database structure question.. this one is easy

Shouldn’t your second example have judgeid,locationid,requiredcount,trialduration in the court table as well. Either way, the extra table is the way to go.

From: shacs-bounces at shsu.edu [mailto:shacs-bounces at shsu.edu] On Behalf Of Bronius Motekaitis
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 8:54 AM
To: shacs
Subject: [Shacs] database structure question.. this one is easy

Let's consider the tables: Hearing, Court, Judge, and Location (notice the CAPS: I did that so I wouldn't scare away any Access fans and undergrads..!)

A Hearing can hear any Court's cases at any Location by any Judge, so these are all foreign keys on Hearing. When creating a Hearing, I want to populate default values for Judge, Location and a handful of other values not shown here based on the Court selected.

Where should I attach these default values?  Does it make more sense to make a "Court_Default" table or stuff the given Court table with these foreign key values as defaults?

See attached for comparison of the two models considered..

-bronius
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