Question

I have to generate a view that shows tracking across each month. The ultimate view will be something like this:

| Person | Task | Jan | Feb | Mar| Apr | May | June . . .
| Joe | Roof Work | 100% | 50% | 50% | 25% |
| Joe | Basement Work | 0% | 50% | 50% | 75% |
| Tom | Basement Work | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |

I already have the following tables:

1. Person
2. Task

I am now creating a new table to foreign key into the above 2 tables and i am trying to figure out the pros and cons of creating 1 or 2 tables.

Option 1:

Create a new table with the following Columns:

1. Id
2. PersonId
3. TaskId
4. Jan2012
5. Feb2012
6. Mar2012
7. Apr2013

or

Option 2:

have 2 seperate tables

One table for just

1. Id
2. PersonId
3. TaskId

and another table for just the following columns

1. Id
2. PersonTaskId (the id from table above)
3. MonthYearKey
4. MonthYearValue

So an example record would be

| 1 | 13 | Jan2011 | 100% |

where 13 would represent a specific unique Person and Task combination. This second way would avoid having to create new columns to continue over time (which seems right) but i also want to avoid overkill.

which would be a more scalable way to have this schema. Also, any other suggestions or more elegant ways of doing this would be great as well?

Answer 1

You can have a m2m table with data columns. I don’t see a reason why you can’t just put MonthYearKey, MonthYearValue on the same table with PersonId and TaskId

Id
TaskId
PersonId
MonthYearKey
MonthYearValue

It’s possible too that you would want to move the MonthYearKey out into their own table, it really just comes down to common queries and what this data is used for.

I would note, you never want to design a schema where you are adding columns due to time. The first option would require maintenance all the time, and would become very difficult to query also.