Normalization two types of customers into one table

Posted by JDewzy on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by JDewzy
Published on 2012-12-10T23:33:27Z Indexed on 2012/12/11 5:04 UTC
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database-design

I am trying to model a sales situation where you can sell to a person or to a business with a contact person. I cannot figure out the proper way to do this.

It seems like 2 tables would be incorrect. But how do I model a Customer table that can be a business or a person? Would I just have a boolean for "business" and an additional "business_name" field that would default to Null. But then I have to do an if/then on the columns and that seems like poor design.

Any advice, direction, or links is appreciated.

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