My application saves posts to database, I have 6 different types of posts and I delibrately NOT joining these post tables with any other tables.
Now, they all share some common columns, like,
PostID, UserID, Title, Body, PostDate, ViewCount, and many more common columns...
And, these 6 types of posts have many of their own unique columns also. So I came up with 2 approaches.
Approach 1 Make 7 tables, a common post table which has all shared columns and 6 other post tables for their unique columns.
Approach 2 Make 6 tables and just duplicate the common columns to each table.
I personaly is liking Approach 1 better so far, but still want to ask before I do anything. So, what is your take on the 2 designs in terms of,
- Performance/Index
- Ease of coding (I'm using c#/EF4)
- Maintainability
- Extensibility (definitly will add more columns in future, and maybe more post tables)
Feel free to recommend other ways than what I came up with. Thank you!