Just thought I'd run this by people here as a sanity check.

I have a system where we have a table PERSON that contains one entry per person. There is a PersonID column that is the primary key.

A person can be a student, a person can be an instructor. Or both. (And in the future that list will expand)

I decided to tackle this by creating two tables - STUDENT_DETAILS and INSTRUCTOR_DETAILS - which use PersonID as their primary key column.

I then created two views - STUDENT and INSTRUCTOR - that retrieve all fields (including the PERSON fields). So people can write queries like "Give me all students" without having to do the joins explicitly with the PERSON table.

Any other recommendations/criticism? I loosely based this on DB2's Object-Relational extensions, they allow typed tables and inheritance that mimic the Object-Oriented world.

jono

That seems like a pretty good way of doing it.

Ravi

Sounds like you stumbled upon a subtype.