Best way to model Customer <--> Address
- by Jen
Every Customer has a physical address and an optional mailing address. What is your preferred way to model this?
Option 1. Customer has foreign key to Address
Customer (id, phys_address_id, mail_address_id)
Address (id, street, city, etc.)
Option 2. Customer has one-to-many relationship to Address, which contains a field
to describe the address type
Customer (id)
Address (id, customer_id, address_type, street, city, etc.)
Option 3. Address information is de-normalized and stored in Customer
Customer (id, phys_street, phys_city, etc. mail_street, mail_city, etc.)
One of my overriding goals is to simplify the object-relational mappings, so I'm leaning towards the first approach. What are your thoughts?
