Question

I would like to create a web site about universities. My problem is trying to find an efficient way to store departments and universities in tables. For example Koc University has departments Computer Engineering, Business Administration, Economics. But Sabanci University has also Computer Engineering and Economics in its departments. I was thinking that having a table which has university ID’s and department ID’s but I’m not sure that it is the best idea. Do you have any ideas?

Answer 1

Chances are pretty good that you’ll want to differentiate between the departments in each university. So, for example, the Economics department at Koc is different from the Economics department at Sabanci. For that you needs two tables:

+--------------------
| University        |
+-------------------+
| UniversityId      |
| Name              |
+-------------------+

+-------------------+
| Department        |
+-------------------+
| DepartmentId      |
| Name              |
| UniversityId      |
+-------------------+

If you only need to reference department type for each university without any extra data about the depoartment, i.e., you only want to know that both Sabanci and Koc have economics departments and nothing else, you can still use the above or you can use this structure:

+--------------------
| University        |
+-------------------+
| UniversityId      |
| Name              |
+-------------------+

+-------------------+
| Department        |
+-------------------+
| DepartmentId      |
| Name              |
+-------------------+

+-------------------+
| UniDept           |
+-------------------+
| UniversityId      |
| DepartmentId      |
+-------------------+