database design question
James Lance
james at thelances.net
Thu Sep 18 11:29:34 MDT 2008
I thought I would see if any of you DBA's out there have any advice.
I'm building an inventory system that deals with inventory tracking,
and also with where inventory is being sold (outlets). I'm having a
bit of a problem with dealing with outlet over rides. For example, I
have a pair of shoes and the shoes are available in different sizes.
I'm selling these shoes on amazon.com and ebay.com. I want my price
to be different for amazon than with ebay. I'm trying to build the
tables that deal with the outlet differences. Let me put up a
simplified version of the current database:
Product:
name
sku
price
manufacturer
weight
box-dimensions
type (can be master or normal. If master then see options table)
...etc...
Product Option:
FK to Product
sku
desc
value
Now I have the Outlet:
Outlet:
name
url
...etc...
ProductOutlet:
FK to Product
FK to Outlet
price (overrides default price)
quantity
Now here comes the part that I'm confused about. How should I deal
with the Product options? I've thought of a few ways to deal with
them, but none seem very good. The ProductOutlet table is a many to
many relationship. It seems odd to me to add an option table that
refers to a many to many lookup table.
ProductOptionOutlet?
FK to ProductOutlet (navigating back to product gets tedious, I can
add more FK's)
FK to ProductOption
quantity
Does anyone have any suggestions for how I could deal with this? I'm
really not even certain if I should keep the way that I'm dealing with
products and their options.
Thanks,
James Lance
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