Generic Database table design

Posted by Gazeth on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Gazeth
Published on 2010-06-16T16:21:56Z Indexed on 2010/06/16 16:32 UTC
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Filed under:

sql

|

sql-server

|

database-design

Just trying to figure out the best way to design my table for the following scenario:

I have several areas in my system (documents, projects, groups and clients) and each of these can have comments logged against them.

My question is should I have one table like this:

CommentID
DocumentID
ProjectID
GroupID
ClientID
etc

Where only one of the ids will have data and the rest will be NULL or should I have a seperate CommentType table and have my comments table like this:

CommentID
CommentTypeID
ResourceID (this being the id of the project/doc/client)
etc

My thoughts are that option 2 would be more efficient from an indexing point of view?

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