Keeping it too simple

I’m sure you’ve heard the term K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Well, I think I tried to keep it too simple. I’m about 60 – 70% through design/development of the data warehouse. The warehouse will store data on students, teachers, schedules, test scores, etc. I had originally setup tables for active and inactive students as well as teachers (one each, four in all). Sounds good on paper but it wasn’t a good move after all.

The other night, I started thinking about those four tables. I realized that it wasn’t a good idea to have the students/teachers split between tables based on whether they are active or inactive. Part of what made me start thinking about this was the last three DTS packages I made for importing ACT, SAT and ACT PLAN test scores (flat files). I was writing two seperate queries for each DTS package to assign a student number, one that assigned from the active students table and the other from the inactive students table.

I decided to just add a column that would hold the date at which the student, or teacher, became inactive. Now, I just have one table for students and one for teachers. I didn’t significantly gain any speed or lose any storage space by merging the tables (four down to two) but it makes it easier when I need to be able to pull student info and match it up to data from the other tables.

Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing. – Adolph Monod

05.Mar.06 General, Microsoft SQL