Hello All -

I'm designing a database for a fairly large site with a number of sections (i.e. About, Industry, Clients, etc.)

Generally speaking, all pages within each section have the same layout: Image, headline, subhead, text. Since this was the case, I've decided to name each DB table based upon the section (table - industry) so if someone hits the Industry menu item I just grab the proper page from that table (like "industry > immigration")

My basic field names for the Industry table are like this:

ID - row id
Page - page name
Title - page title text
Headline - page headline
Subhead - page subhead
Image - source path to the image
Text - page text.

So far so good, but then I ran into a "gotcha" in the spec. Also within the industry section is a Q & A page which, naturally, will have multiple subhead fields (for the questions) and multiple text fields (for the answers). Naturally, this is the ONLY page within this section that diverts from the other pages in the industry section.

So, what to do??? What would you do?

Since Q & A could contain any number of question and answers, should I create a seperate table for this one page. This would be a shame because I'm trying to keep the DB as lean and uncluttered (with tables) as possible. The scenario above does, however, somewhat blow my desire.

I haven't been doing DB design for very long, and I can't really come to a better solution than splitting out a table for that one page.

Any comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Expatriate

You should not have a separate table for each page type, you should have a single table and indicate via a column the page type.

as for your problem with the industry table, you would add an additional table and use a join to draw the appropriate information out of both tables.