Question

Okay so I am trying to figure out the best design for this problem. I am trying to create a database in which I have leads, clients and contracts. What I am thinking is I should have two tables for the leads and clients. Although these are hopefully the same entities. My second thoughts on this is to just create a table called something like client_status that would look something like.

CREATE TABLE status(
  status_id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  status_name VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY(status_id)
);
  INSERT INTO status (status_id, status_name) VALUES ( '1', 'Prospect');
  INSERT INTO status (status_id, status_name) VALUES ( '2', 'Client');

CREATE TABLE client(
  client_id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  fname VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL,
  mname VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL,
  lname VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY(client_id)
);

CREATE TABLE client_status(
  status_id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  client_id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  FOREIGN KEY(status_id) REFERENCES status(status_id),
  FOREIGN KEY(client_id) REFERENCES clients(client_id)
);

Would this be the correct way to handle the problem at hand?

Answer 1

This is exactly how I would set this up. This allows you to have a client with multiple statuses.

The one suggestion that I have is to create the PRIMARY KEY on the client_status table as both columns.