Question

I have a new layout to figure it has 3 tables

UnfiledFiles
SortedFiles
FileVersion

The process will start with an UnfiledFile Record and a FileVersion and several versions may be added all joined to the same UnfiledFile
From there I am going to need to tie all the Versions for a particular UnfiledFile record with a SortedFile Record.

What organization would you see this working best with?

Answer 1

Why store UnfiledFiles and SortedFiles as separate tables? It appears that being unfiled versus sorted is just an attribute of a file.

So you need two tables: Files and Versions. Versions contains a foreign key to Files. Files contains an attribute column is_sorted.

CREATE TABLE Files (
  file_id   INT PRIMARY KEY,
  is_sorted INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
);

CREATE TABLE Versions (
  file_id    INT NOT NULL,
  version    INT NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (file_id, version),
  FOREIGN KEY (file_id) REFERENCES Files (file_id)
);

If you want to make it clear which files you’re querying, you can create views:

CREATE VIEW UnfiledFiles AS SELECT * FROM Files WHERE is_sorted = 0;

CREATE VIEW SortedFiles AS SELECT * FROM Files WHERE is_sorted <> 0;