I am designing database for a school system. I am having to create a lot of tables and a lot of link tables to maintain a structure in the system.
I am trying to maintain foreign integrity and trying to create unique data entry as possible. But this will create problem with queries when I start building out the system. I will have to make a lot of joins and I am afraid that this take a toll on optimization and performance.
In this instance,
I have a student who is taking a course for a subject. While he takes the course he can be borrow a book related to that subject from library.
My tables would be
a. Subjects with: id, name
b. course with: id, name, subject id
c. link table to know that the student is taking the course: id, user id, course id
d. library item table id name
e. a link table to know which library item the student is borrowing: library id, id from c
I am trying to user primary key from c because this will make sure that if the user is no longer taking the course he would not be allowed to borrow a book. The link table will cascade if the relation does not exist between the course and the user.
The problem with this is that. If i need to know the name of the subject that the student has borrowed book for. I have to join four tables. I can simply just add subject id id e to get the subject name. But that is what I hate. If this is really an issue with performance would using views make the queries faster and is it really feasible to implement views in a project.
So I guess my questions in this are,
Is it really a big performance issue to make multiple tables with unique columns. I have heard indexing columns help quite a lot?
Are views helpful in maintaining the relational database and making the queries faster?
And in table c I have not used separate primary key id because I want to make sure that the one student can borrow one item at a time. Is this a good practice?
