I’m designing a database table for a manufacturing company, amongst the tables required is a part applications table (meaning this product applies to x and y product), my current issue is that most product lines have about 3 to 10 applications, but 2 specific lines have up to 100 applications.
At first I thought about storing product applications as a comma separated string, but that would violate the first normal form.
Then I read about storing said applications as a blob, however in the interest of both search optimization and general DB performance this doesn’t seem to be a possibility.
My question is this, is there a way to store part applications in a table without having to create the 70+ columns, while mantaining normal forms and not compromising performance??
You want to add a Look-up table and a many-to-many bridge table.
3rd normal form is usually good. create a table for associated applications. Store a reference ID that is a constraint to whatever other table you were thinking about including this data in.