>My current data design scheme has three tables (Funding, Payments, Charges) to handle financial data of different types. Each has a primary key, two foreign keys, date, amount and an additional field or three.
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>I was going to make a change to all three tables when the obvious question hit me: Would I be better served to collapse all three into a single table?
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>Any opinions to offer questions to explore on this?
One key question is: how similar are the structures. If the tables are similar enough (only a few fields vary), maintenance may be simpler if you combine them. You would need a "type" field, to say whether the corresponding record is a funding, a payment or a charge. C(1) should do.
OTOH, sometimes you are almost forced to combine somewhat dis-similar tables, to simplify relations.
HTH, Hilmar.
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