Hi All,

I would be interested in hearing how others have tackled the following situation: Suppose the application requires a table of locations. Locations have a name and an address. But the rest of the location attributes differ widely depending on the type of location. For example, locations used in the daily operation (deliveries) require a certain set of attributes whereas locations for billing and A/R issues require another set of attributes. Each set of attributes can be quite extensive and some of the locations are BOTH operations and A/R locations..

One solution would be to have a single location table with columns for ALL of the attributes. This is the simplest design but wastes a lot of space.

Another solution would be separate tables for the two types of locations. This design makes reporting more difficult and, where locations are BOTH types, wastes space and opens the application up to integrity problems.

A third solution would use three tables. The first is a 'header' table with columns for all common data. A second table contains the columns for operations and a third table contains the columns for A/R. This design complicates reporting and seems a little wierd because the second and third tables have a one-to-one relationship to the header table.

What do you do ?

Thanks,

Ken