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Asked: 2026-06-01T04:27:49+00:00

I am developing a social network for an intranet, and I came across a

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I am developing a social network for an intranet, and I came across a problem [?]. I have the entities User and Business as main entities of the network.

Note: A Business does not have, necessarily, a relationship with a User.

Following this idea, I have a group table, and a group can be created either by a user or by a business, there comes a question, how can I make the author field in this table?

I did the following, I created a table type, with the following data:

 id | name
  1   user
  2   business

And my table groups like this:

 id
 name
 description
 tid (FK -> type.id)
 author (INT)

Thus, if a group has a tid equals to 1, means that the author is referring to a User, if it have tid equals to 2, it is referring to a Business.

What do you think about this implementation? It is correct?
What can I do to improve it?

I’m using PHP 5.3.6 (Zend Framework and Doctrine2) + MySQL 5.1.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Per request:

    The terminology for this is “polymorphic”. Bill Karwin had a good answer that I can’t find at the moment about it. From a database design perspective, I’ve been told the logical model term for this is an “arc” relationship. Either way, I see no issues with what you posted, other than supporting multiple authors.

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