Question

I’ve been struggling with how I should indicate that a certain record in a database is the “fallback” or default entry. I’ve also been struggling with how to reduce my problem to a simple problem statement. I’m going to have to provide an example.

Suppose that you are building a very simple shipping application. You’ll take orders and will need to decide which warehouse to ship them from.

Let’s say that you have a few cities that have their own dedicated warehouses*; if an order comes in from one of those cities, you’ll ship from that city’s warehouse. If an order comes in from any other city, you want to ship from a certain other warehouse. We’ll call that certain other warehouse the fallback warehouse.

You might decide on a schema like this:

Warehouses
    WarehouseId
    Name

WarehouseCities
    WarehouseId
    CityName

The solution must enforce zero or one fallback warehouses.

You need a way to indicate which warehouse should be used if there aren’t any warehouses specified for the city in question. If it really matters, you’re doing this on SQL Server 2008.

EDIT: To be clear, all valid cities are NOT present in the WarehouseCities table. It is possible for an order to be received for a City not listed in WarehouseCities. In such a case, we need to be able to select the fallback warehouse.

If any number of default warehouses were allowed, or if I was assigning default warehouses to, say, states, I would use a DefaultWarehouse table. I could use such a table here, but I would need to limit it to exactly one row, which doesn’t feel right.

How would you indicate the fallback warehouse?

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^{*Of course, in this example we discount the possibility that there might be multiple cities with the same name. The country you are building this application for rigorously enforces a uniqueness constraint on all city names.}

Answer 1

I understand your problem, but have questions about parts of it, so I’ll be a bit more general.

• If at all possible I would store warehouse/backup warehouse data with your inventory data (either directly hanging of warehouses, or if it’s product specific off the inventory tables).
• If the setup has to be calculated through your business logic then the records should hang off the order/order_item table

In terms how to implement the structure in SQL, I’ll assume that all orders ship out of a single warehouse and that the shipping must be hung off the orders table (but the ideas should be applicable elsewhere):

• The older way to enforce zero/one backup warehouses would be to hang a Warehouse_Source record of the Orders table and include an “IsPrimary” field or “ShippingPriority” then include a composite unique index that includes OrderID and IsPrimary/ShippingPriority.

• if you will only ever have one backup warehouse you could add ShippingSource_WareHouseID and ShippingSource_Backup_WareHouseID fields to the order. Although, this isn’t the route I would go.

In SQL 2008 and up we have the wonderful addition of Filtered Indexes. These allow you to add a WHERE clause to your index — resulting in a more compact index. It also has the added benefit of allowing you to accomplish some things that could only be done through triggers in the past.

• You could put a Unique filtered index on OrderID & IsPrimary/ShippingPriority (WHERE IsPrimary = 0).

Add a comment or such if you want me to explain further.