Question

Good day!

I am a newbie on creating database… I need to create a db for my recruitment web application.

My database schema is as follows:

NOTE: I included the applicant_id on other tables… e.g. exam, interview, exam type.

Am i violating any normalization rule? If i do, what do you recommend to improve my design? Thank you

Answer 1

Overall looks good. A few minor points to consider:

• Interviewer is also a person. You will need to use program logic to prevent different / misspellings.
• The longest real life email address I’ve seen was 62 characters.
• In exam you use the reserved word date for a column name
• (subjective) I would rename applicant_date to applied_at
• I don’t see a postal / zip code for the applicant
• All result columns are VARCHAR(4). If they use the same values, can they be normalized?
• Birthdate is better to store then age. You don’t want to schedule someone for an interview on their birthdate (or if you’re cruel by nature, you do want that 🙂 ). Age can be derived from it and will also be correct at all times.

EDIT:
Given that result is PASS or FAIL, simply declare the field a boolean and name it ‘passed’. A lot faster.