Database Design

In my work over the years that I have continually strived for the ideal structure of a lookup table. I must have designed hundreds of them by now in at least four different RDBMS engines. I may have finally arrived at a structure I really like, so I thought I would share it, with the hope that other people may benefit from adopting it, or even better, suggest improvements to the design.

This post contains a description of a design process I went through for a SQL Server 2005 SSIS-based workflow system. You may find it helpful if you are working on a similar kind of SSIS-based application.

One key quality these kinds of systems have in common is that they are usually unattended in nature--or at least people would prefer them to be. Robust and reliable unattended operation, though, does not come for free. We must design for it and build it in.