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So i have a table that's for products and depending on the product the col can have different values, example:

Product DVD: SKU Name Price Size(MB)

Product Book: Sku Name Price Weight

Deppending on the product that is "DVD, book or Furniture", i have to change the column

I thought about using 3 different tables but i think it got ugly for legibility purposes

Shadow
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Leonardo Ribeiro
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2 Answers2

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You can create 'basic'

create table Products ( Upc varchar(100), Description varchar(15), Price1 money).

And another table for 'specific' features like

create table ProductFeatures( upc varchar(100), Param varchar(100), Value varchar(100).

But this design will miss data types...

khablander62
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You are looking for the data type "sql_variant" BUT don't go there! sql_variant mucks things up. I don't remember the specifics but I do remember that down the road I was kicking myself (Quite HARD) for having used it -- You have been warned.

Put them all into a varchar and then treat them differently in code is my suggestion. You can make views that casts the column to a particular data type depending on the product type if you need to.

Another good approach that works in many cases is to create a child table to the Product table to hold the non-uniform data... ie. Product_Attribute table with AttributeType and AttributeValue colums. The nice thing about the child table is that the attributes for a product that you have to keep track of only grows over time as the system matures. You are ready for this growth with a child table.

MichaelInOr
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