Question

I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out how to structure my database for an application I’m building.

There will be three different types of users:

• Admin
• Applicants
• Reviewers

I’m planning on having a general users table to store shared information between each user type. However, I’ll need to store quite a bit of information for Applicants that I won’t for Reviewers, or Admins, and I’ll need to store some permissions information for Reviewers that I won’t for Applicants.

I know I’ll need to set up some additional tables to accommodate this information but I’m not sure how to do so. Should my users table have an admin_data, reviewer_data, applic_data fields as FKs? How would I detect what type of a user a person is when they login?

Each user will only need to be one type.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Have an accounts table with login info, account id and account type. Then join to the appropriate related table (admin, reviewer, etc) to get relevant info.

There’s no reason to mix the data since it sounds like it varies quite a bit.