On 8/30/06, Randall Lucas <rlucas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm storing facts about an entity (e.g., "company") in a normalized form with various repeating groups, link tables, etc. My workflow requires that after (or as part of) collecting these facts, I be able to "sign off" as having verified all of the facts that pertain to a given company. I understand this as meaning I need to sign off on each row that was used in answering the query "select * from company left join ..."
An inverted way of thinking about the problem is the notion of getting a source document (say, a "company registration form") and parsing and storing it in a normalized format. How do you "tag" the origin of each and every row in every table that resulted from that source document?
your form should have a code, either entered by the customer or by the preparer who enters it into the database, which becomes the key that identifies the registration document. Put that key into other tables.
It is possible to do so by associating an extra column with each inserted or modified value (yuck).
be careful, you are flirting with EAV thinking. I think EAV designs are terrible. > It seems to me that the elegant way to do this would be to get the
entire graph of dependencies for not only all tables that reference the entity, but only those rows within those tables that refer specifically to my entity. The query engine should have a pretty good idea about which tables and which rows would actually be used in forming the responses to a given query. How can I get this information? Or am I off the deep end (-ency graph) with this one?
I am not sure where you are going with this. Maybe you should mock up some simple tables and repost your question. merlin
