Settle an argument for me

[Samj]

Say you want to design a DB for a chain of Sporting Goods stores, better yet, many chains of them. You need all of the stores within the chain to work out of one DB. Some of the chains want to share all of their data: inventory, customers, billing, vendors & purchases, everything. Some of the chains don't want to share inventory, they want their own item-nums, pricing and qtys. All of the chains need to work out of the same DB structure and r-code.

How would you modify the Progress Sports DB and application code, simply, to run in multiple locations?

Thanks for thinking...

 

[mpowell_esq]

Basically you have this client, trying to pursue a client - though do not know about db design. Wishing to modify the sports db and UI that is freely given. Sorry to disappoint though the Sports entity will take a lot of modifying. The db changes are only slight, then with how PSC works you need to recompile all src to match the new db.
I will not do the work for this client foy you, sorry.

 

[Ach]

Yeah, I agree with you. He needs to learn DB designing and also application designing.

Samj..try to find out about Entity concept. That way, you can have same tables working for different chains and the data can be seperate from each other as well as merge with each other thru the application.

Can't help you much here as you need to know the designing first or you will not understand.

 

[TomBascom]

You would need to create a table that tracks groupings of stores ("chains") and you would then need to add a "chain id" pretty much everywhere and modify just about all of the code to behave accordingly.

A lot of the changes would be minor -- just adding a field and setting it appropriately.

 

[Samj]

No, no, no. I guess I didn't make myself clear. I am familiar with DB design. I know how to do it, I've already done it. I just wanted to settle a difference of opinion about the design. I know that it would require new tables and adding new fields and indexes. I was just looking for validation for my side of the argument. We own the source code and DB definition for the Apprise application and I'm suggesting we use something similar to that and am meeting with opposition to that idea. But, after trying to include snipets of the DB structure and code I realized that it would be a very long post and would require to much of your all's time to respond. Thanks anyways.