Re: Design question regarding data typing

Sure. I was trying to explain that one column of my Insitutions table
was the foreign key InstitutionTypeId which indexes the name (and
description) of the type of institution (which in this simplification
can be either "school" or "bank"). I have this in addition to separate
Banks and Schools tables. The reason for using the InstitutionType
descriptor (or as I gather it's called from Roy's post above,
"discriminant") is so that if I want summary instituition data from
Insitutions I can easily figure out the institution type without having
to scan for each InstutionId foreign key of interest in Banks Schools.
And that's the kludge that's causing me such consternation. :-( It just
reeks of bad form.

Am I making any sense?

Anyway, Bob. Thanks much for your help here. I do highly apprecaite it.
:-)


Jacob

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