Question

I want to store this information in a database:

Company
   |
   |-- Dept 1--,
   |            \->Employee 1
   |             |->Employee 2
   |
   |-- Dept 2--,
   |            \->Employee 3
   |
   |-> Employee 4
   \-> Employee 5

I’ve already got this far: I need a employee table and the department and company items are just the same so they should be in the same table…

employee // id | information...
branch  //  id | information....

Each employee should be linked to a branch. And each branch can be connected to another branch…

employeeBranch // employee.id | branch.id | enum(current, historical)
branchBranch   // branch.id   | branch.id

This makes it possible to have multiple levels of branches…

But I’m doubting if this is The way to do it..

Answer 1

If employees can only belong to one branch and branches can only be a child to one branch then you might consider adding a column to represent this information instead of whole new tables:

employee // id | branchId | information
branch   // id | parentBranchId | information

If you have many to many relationships for employee/branch and branch/branch then I think your original structure is fine.