Hi

I am about to design an application wherein i need to store the ethnicity user.

a)Should i be storing it as
User isChineese isAmerican isTurkish isAfrican

or would it be better if i use

b)User Ethinicty with a check constrain on ethinicty to include a valid set of ethinicty values.

I am tending more towards B) but i am not a datamodeller just exp with Relational DB's .

what do you guys think.

regards
Hrishy

Hi,

Something similar to

Table1:

ethinicity_key (PK) ' primary key
ethinicity_desc (U) ' unique constrain

In any other table in your database which should include
this info, you'll include ethinicity_key as FK (foreignkey)

Regards,
Shurik.

Agreed. You've got a normalisation problem with idea #1. Idea #2 means you need to change your DDL everytime any ethnicity types are added\ deleted\ changed. You would also need to somehow match up what you expose to the user as available ethnicities with the check constraint. Using a table & foreign key constraints solves all these issues.

Hi Guys

Thank you very much i appreciate the response.

regards
Hrishy

Problem is, people today are too racially diverse to categorize.

I suggest using a bigint to store the RGB value of their skin tone.