Hi Jorge,

It all depends on what you need, also keep in mind that whenever you need all the information for a given item you'll have to pull it from all the different tables, that is, to present the user with something meaningful you'll have to link the items table to the classes, colors, sizes, models, and brands table, to pull the actual descriptions, since you'll only have numeric id's in your items table, you can do this through table relations or views, it's just more work than with a flat items table.

This is precisely why I chose a 'flat' table approach for my solution. Less tables, easier RI, smaller footprint, ease of queries, etc. With storage space so cheap today, I don't care if "BLUE" pants repeats 200 times in the data. I didn't want to spend days training the client how to query his data with Excel. 30 minutes and he had the basics down. Having to drill down through 5 or more tables didn't look very appealing to me. Or adding a new item and updating all the underlying tables is more work than I need or want. We do what we have to, within budget constraints.