Which Table Should be Master and Child in Database Design
- by Jason
I am quickly learning the ins and outs of database design (something that, as of a week ago, was new to me), but I am running across some questions that don't seem immediately obvious, so I was hoping to get some clarification.
The question I have right is about foreign keys. As part of my design, I have a Company table. Originally, I had included address information directly within the table, but, as I was hoping to achieve 3NF, I broke out the address information into its own table, Address. In order to maintain data integrity, I created a row in Company called "addressId" as an INT and the Address table has a corresponding addressId as its primary key.
What I'm a little bit confused about (or what I want to make sure I'm doing correctly) is determining which table should be the master (referenced) table and which should be the child (referencing) table. When I originally set this up, I made the Address table the master and the Company the child. However, I now believe this is wrong due to the fact that there should be only one address per Company and, if a Company row is deleted, I would want the corresponding Address to be removed as well (CASCADE deletion).
I may be approaching this completely wrong, so I would appreciate any good rules of thumb on how to best think about the relationship between tables when using foreign keys. Thanks!
