Hi all,

I would have done exactly the same as Brendt's 'dba' - probably due to lack of experience...

All your comments makes sense, but as noted by Mordechai, how would you represent the data? Would you have a table with one column(year)

How would you join this table with say a transactional table if you need to see all tranactions for a specific year?

Thanks
Thinus

-----Original Message-----
From: M Stephen Kalevik
[mailto:mssqldba-ezmlmshield-x68069258.[Email address protected]
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 5:12 PM
To: LazyDBA Discussion
Subject: Re: Opinions (and I know you have 'em)


I agree. The year is unique without having an additional ID. A user
datatype for how you want represent year might be useful with a rule bound
to it for valid years might be useful. Or a validation table that has a
list of valid years.





"Brendt Hess " <mssqldba-ezmlmshield-x39229436.[Email address protected]
06/27/2006 06:36 PM

To
"LazyDBA Discussion" <[Email address protected]
cc

Subject
Opinions (and I know you have 'em)






I am in the process of evaluating and revising an existing DB that was
designed by the previous 'dba' (a programmer with minimal understanding of
relational design), and I came across this table:

Year

It contains two columns:
year_id decimal(18,0)
year int

Now, our parts data needs to reference the year (motorcycles, you know),
BUT.....

So, I decided to ask. Is there *anyone* that believes this is a correct
normalization step?

Note that a part is specifically related to one or more make/model/year
combinations, so it is possible that someone might think that this would
be
correct. But really, how can replacing one constant value with a larger
constant value, both of which will never change, be considered valid
normalization? It's like the people who replace state codes (char(2)
fields) with a table of states and an int ID field (4 bytes), when the
state
codes themselves could be the identifier.

Opinions? Yeah, I have 'em. I just want to hear some others, so that I
can
see if I am off on a tangent here.

Brendt




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