Question

I’m mostly just curious if this is a bad idea for some reason.

I’m storing some temperatures that will be associated with places, and rather than adding a field for the temperature to the place_date table, I thought I’d just have a temps table and use the join the tables using the temps table id as the temperature data.

For instance, if it’s 102F in Palm Desert on June 14, 2012, my place_date table would have

place_id |    date    | temp_id
  14     | 2012-06-14 | 101

aside from dealing with negative numbers, is there any reason not to do this?

Answer 1

It seems to me that in this case, putting the temperatures in another table will make your queries more complicated and slow, for absolutely no benefit.

In many cases, it makes sense to split one table into two, but this just doesn’t seem to be the case.

But if you want to do it anyway, don’t forget to use foreign key on the temp_id column.