Question

I am putting together a schema for a database. The goal of the database is to track applications in our department. I have a repeated problem that I am trying to solve.

For example, I have an “Applications” table. I want to keep track if any application uses a database or a bug tracking system so right now I have fields in the Applications table called

Table: Applications
UsesDatabase (bit)
Database_ID (int)
UsesBugTracking (bit)
BugTracking_ID (int)

Table: Databases:
id
name

Table: BugTracking:
id
name

Should I consolidate the “uses” column with the respective ID columns so there is only one bug tracking column and only one database column in the applications table?

Any best practice here for database design?

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NOTE: I would like to run reports like “Percent of Application that use bug tracking” (although I guess either approach could generate this data.)

Answer 1

You could remove the “uses” fields and make the id columns nullable, and let a null value mean that it doesn’t use the feature. This is a common way of representing a missing value.

Edit:
To answer your note, you can easily get that statistics like this:

select
  count(*) as TotalApplications,
  count(Database_ID) as UsesDatabase,
  count(BugTracking_ID) as UsesBugTracking
from
  Applications