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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T05:26:42+00:00

I’ve run across something that’s bugging me just enough that I wanted to come

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I’ve run across something that’s bugging me just enough that I wanted to come here and seek out a sort of “best practice” type of advice from you guys (et gals)

I have a table in my model, let’s call it prospect. Two separate external systems can provide an update for rows in this table, but only as a “status” of that record in those respective systems.

I need to store those statuses locally. Initial idea, of course, it just to make two nullable foreign keys. Something like this.

+-----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field           | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| prospect_id     | int(11)      | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| ext_status_1_id | int(11)      | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| ext_status_2_id | int(11)      | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+-----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

In this example there would be, of course, two tables that hold id/value pairs for statuses.

Here’s the catch – ext_status_2_id will always be NULL unless ext_status_1_id is 1 (this is just how the business rules work).

Have I modeled this correctly? I just have this nagging voice in the back of my brain telling me that “not every row in prospect will need an ext_status_2_id so this might not be right”.

If it matters, this is MySQL 5.0.45 and I’m using InnoDB

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since there is an in-built dependency for Status2 on Status1, why not just have a single status field on the prospect table, and create Status2 as a property on the Status1 table? It is certainly normalized heavily in this fashion but having the data structure this way speaks about the dependency of Status2 on Status1.

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