Right, I poster earlier with a practice table I was working on. I appreciated the reply and have been working on that.. but yesterday I got a real client's project.

I have been given the task of optimizing the database design.
The database keeps track of the transactions the company makes. A transaction is made and records are stored in several different tables.


These are the tables:

Ledger
Group
User
Opening Balance
Transaction
Transaction Type



The client would like

1) the data to be stored in ONE location and not 2 different places

2) to save disk space

3) prevent duplicate entries being


Any ideaS? I wont post the current design of the database unless necessary as I would like to try and do it all by myself but some pointers would be appreciated.

Initially I was thinking of denormalization. Eradicating the multiple tables and placing all data in one table. But this might not be the best strategy. How would you do it? What practices would you use?

ANY help would be appreciated.

Thanks!!

>>1) the data to be stored in ONE location and not 2 different places
You mentioned 6 tables, not 2.

>>2) to save disk space
Disk space is minimal

>>3) prevent duplicate entries being
Combining those tables will cause more duplicate data

If you have transactions on an account that are cleared at the end of the month you can store bucket totals of opening balance in another table. Your only choice here is to move the total to the detail level which means the beginning balance will repeat for every entry in a single month which can lead to problems.

If your client is an accountant then tell him let you will handle the technical aspects and he should advise on the business side.

You have to perform normalization on the database to accomplish:
2) to save disk space

3) prevent duplicate entries being

The link below may be some help:
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/An-...Normalization/