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 General customer info gathering database

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Linok
Starting Member

34 Posts

Posted - 2007-02-23 : 10:04:28
Hey everyone,

I'm new to SQL server, and I've got a project I'm a bit stumped on. I need to create a single database (with accompanying API) to store customer information that is gathered from various areas of a website (or websites, as my company currently has 5). The database needs to have all the normal contact info (name, address, phone, etc) as well as any custom fields that might be relevant given the source (for example, one source might also need a product serial number). I've been banging my head against my desk for 2 days and nothing has fallen out yet :-P.

So far the ideas I've thrown around included two tables, one huge table for the actual customer info and another for the sources, but I don't know how I could build and API that could effectively interface with it considering you wouldn't know what kind of info was going to be hitting the table.

The second idea I've had was to create a source table, a customer base table, and a customer data item table that stored info in kind of a key/value pair. The problem I had with this was that I wouldn't know what datatype I would need and I didn't really know how to handle that.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

nr
SQLTeam MVY

12543 Posts

Posted - 2007-02-23 : 21:10:49
Product and serial number doesn't sound like customer information.
Think you might be having problems because you've been asked to get customer info but haven't defined what that is.

You can have a table with a lot of columns only applicable to different sources and can change the structure as new sources are added - but make sure that it is customer data.

==========================================
Cursors are useful if you don't know sql.
DTS can be used in a similar way.
Beer is not cold and it isn't fizzy.
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