Kbase P25828: Dynamics. Normalization and Table Design
| Autor |
Progress Software Corporation - Progress |
| Acesso |
Público |
| Publicação |
26/05/2003 |
|
Status: Unverified
GOAL:
Dynamics. Normalization and Table Design
FACT(s) (Environment):
Dynamcis 2.0A
FIX:
1. If data is not unnecessarily replicated in different places, then the process of updating and otherwise managing that data in an application is greatly simplified.
2. If it is possible to construct a single straightforward database query to identify a desired dataset, then it will generally be easy to build an application out of standard components that use such queries to retrieve and filter data. If you require a complicated procedural block of 4GL code to identify the data you need, because the relationships are encoded in special field values, or in arrays, then you are not easily going to succeed in managing that data through Dynamics, without doing extra programming to present your data to the rest of the application.
You may decide, for perfectly legitimate reasons, to denormalize (replicate) data in particular cases for performance reasons. For example, you might chose to store an order total (which must always equal the total of the amounts in the order lines of the order) in the order record itself. Make sure that such data
replication is really necessary, and that you have considered the responsibility you take on when you do this. You must use database triggers or business logic to assure that the values are always kept in sync.