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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T22:45:24+00:00

I have a database storing customer enquiries about products. The enquiry reference (text), product

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I have a database storing customer enquiries about products.

The enquiry reference (text), product number (int) and revision number (int) together uniquely identifies a single discussion between sales and customer.

As a result, there are many tables each for a specific detail about a single enquiry, uqniuely idenified by enq, pdt and rev values combined.

The CREATE TABLE does not use any AUTO INCREMENT UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY for any field.

My question is, is this database design acceptable?
Should tables always be normalized?

Thanks for advise.

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  1. Editorial Team

    There’s no need to use AUTOINCREMENT, but every table should have a PRIMARY KEY of some kind. A primary key can be a combination of several fields that together identify the record uniquely.

    Based on what you’ve told us, yes, the design is acceptable, provided you explicitly declare the combination of the enquiry reference (text), product number (int) and revision number (int) as a primary key that together uniquely identifies a single discussion.

    People sometimes denormalize a database for performance reasons. If select queries are far more frequent than inserts and updates, and the select query of interest is slow to return because of the number of tables it has to join, then consider denormalizing.

    If you supply a specific query that is running slow for you, you’ll get lots of specific advice.

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