Question

I have a problem, I am designing a database which will store different products and each product may have different details.
As an example it will need to store books with multiple authors and store software with different types of descriptions.
This is my current design:

Product_table

|ID|TYPE|COMPANY|

|1|1|1|

attr_table

|ID|NAME|
|1|ISBN10|
|2|ISBN13|
|3|Title|
|4|Author|

details_table

|ID|attr_id|value

|1|3|Book of adventures|

Connector_table

|id|pro_id|detail_id|
|1|1|1|

So the product table would only store the main product id, the company it belongs to and the type of product it is.
Then I would have the attribute table which lists each attribute a product could have, this will make it easier to add new types of products.
The details table will the hold all the values such as different authors, titles isbn10s etc.
And then the connector table would connect the product table and the details table.

My main worry is that the details table will get very large and will be storing lots of different data types.
What i would like would be to split up all of the different types into tables such as ISBN table and author tables.

If this is the case how could i link these tables up to the attr_table

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Don’t bother. You do not say what database you are using, but any reasonable database will be able to handle the details table. Databases are designed to handle big tables efficiently.

If it is really big, you might want to consider partitioning the table by some sort of theme.

Otherwise, just be sure that you have an index on the id in the table and probably on the attr_id as well. The structure should work fine.