Question

I am trying to design a database structure for a website that offers people to open a personal profile.
I am trying to figure out if the design that I’ve chosen is good enough.. The reason i suspect it might be problematic is that I use many relations between many tables. That way, when a person’s page is being loaded, there are many JOINs behind the scenes and that will surely create a bottleneck. I would appreciate if you can help me figuring out if the design is proper or if I should reconsider it.

So I have come up with the following design:

class Person(models.Model):

    GENDER_CHOICES = (
                    ('M', 'Male'),
                    ('F', 'Female'),
    )

    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    # Each person can have one profession
    profession = models.ForeignKey(Profession)
    email = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True)
    website = models.CharField(max_length=200, blank=True)
    gender = models.CharField(max_length=1, choices=GENDER_CHOICES))
    birth_date = models.DateField(blank=True, null=True)    

class Profession(models.Model):    
    type = models.CharField(max_length=20, blank=False, choices = ("Teacher","Pilot","Politician"))

#Each person can have several geolocations (represent the person's home/office/other address)
class Geolocation(models.Model):    
    latitude = models.FloatField()
    longitude = models.FloatField()
    address = models.TextField()
    related_person = models.ForeignKey(Person, blank=False, null=False)

#Each person can have several medias (you tube movies)
class Media(models.Model):
    youtube_id = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    related_person = models.ForeignKey(Person, blank=False, null=False)

#Each person can have several websites
class Websites(models.Model):
    website_url = models.CharField(max_length=200, blank=False)
    website_name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    related_person = models.ForeignKey(Person, blank=False, null=False)
    #See below...
    related_link_farm = models.ForeignKey(LinkFarms, blank=True, null=True)

#Each website that refers to a person must be also refered to a link farm
class LinkFarms(models.Model):
    farm_name = models.CharField(max_length=200, blank=False)

Notice that for each page loaded there are at least 5 table joins.

Thanks,

Meir

Answer 1

It’s ok to normalise data. That’s what relational databases are for! Your design looks fine to me. If it becomes a problem you can always cache page renders.