Hello everyone, hope someone can help me with what I am trying to do. Here you go: I work at a company that provides support IP telephony support to clients. I need to create a database to keep track of our business partners and agreements in the USA. Here are the things we have to keep track of, and the entities I've come up with:

Partner_Agreenement
Partner
Partner_Contact
Partner_Location
Client
Client_Contact
Client_Location
Vendor
Vendor_Contact
Vendor_Location
Vendor_Product

Now here is my challenge, the Partner, Client, and Vendor entities all have Contact and Location in common, meaning that a Partner can be in many locations around the USA as well as the Client and Vendor. How would I go about implementing the relationships and dividing the entities in the ER Diagram. Should I create a single entit called Contact and another called Location and then use all the foreign keys from the Partner, Client and Vendor tables into the Contact and Location, or should I have different contact and location tables for the respective partner, client and vendor like I described above, Or should I use entity types and subtypes, and how do I implement them? I have to run reports from this database that answer questions such as: 1) show all the partners, clients, and vendors that are in Texas 2) What partners can support Vendor_Product xyz for a client in Arizona? for this last questions I should be able to look at the client's location and find out what partners are around the area that can service the client. I know this is kinda long, but hope someone has the time to give me some insight on this, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

boy oh boy oh boy does that ever sound like a homework assignment

heheh yeah it does, but i'm not a database designer

At least we assume that is why you're taking the class... In order to become one. If we do your homework from the get-go, you'll be no better off than you are now.

If you take a shot at doing the assignment, then ask for confirmation of your choices or pointers on specific points, then I suspect that you'll find a much more positive reaction.

-PatP

I am not taking a database class, I'm done with school, have taken 2 database classes during school, but haven't dealt with databases in a while. All I am asking is, what do you thik is the best Idea, to have one general entity like location and have foreign keys from vendor, partner and client stored in that table and have a bunch of null values or create 3 different entities vendor_location, client_location, partner_location.