Question

This might be a very simple question but I wonder which would be the better way to do it under the relational model point of view.

I have 3 types of users:

• Customer
• Staff Member
• Super Customer

All of them have the exact same fields. I have all of them in the same users table, which also makes things easier to work with the framework I’m using.

My question is: is it better to use 3 different boolean fields to difference each type of user or just one field with 3 values?

Currently i have 3 boolean fiels: admin, staff, superuser.

Would that be more clear than creating just only 1 field with 3 values? (for example, 1 for admin, 2 for staff and 3 for superuser)

Thanks.

Answer 1

I suggest one field perhaps a foreign key to a UserType table, something like this:

-- UserType table
-- UserTypeID INT -- PK
-- Type NVARCHAR(50)

and in you user table add one field UserTypeID.

Some users prefer readability so use a one character char field instead of an integer ID when they know the types list will be relatively short.