Question

I’m designing a database which will store information about some artists. These artists can belongs to one or more organizations. From these organizations i just want to store their names and i’m thinking in create a table with these organizations which just have the names as primary key and nothing else. Is the fact of having a table with just the fieds of the primary key a conceptual error? In this case, i will appreciate some suggestions to solve that.

Answer 1

You want an OrganizationId, to handle the situations where the Organization name changes.

You might also have situations where different organizations seem to have the same name. How many “Museum of Modern Art”s are there? (Well, to a New Yorker, only one 😉

Your organization table might expand over time, with columns such as shortname, address, contact person, prefered language, and so on. So, the table should look like:

 create table Organizations (
    OrganizationId int not null identity(1,1),
    Name varchar(255),
    CreatedBy varchar(255) default system_user,
    CreatedAt datetime default getdate()
)

In a mature database, you would even recognize that organizations change names, merge, and sometimes split. You can handle this by adding effective dates and end dates to the records.