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Jon Seigel
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Contact system database design

I'm designing a database for contacts and I'm looking for some feedback on the current design.

What i want:

  • A contact can be a person or an organization.
  • A contact can have many groups.
  • A contact can have many emails and addresses
  • A contact can have one organization (employed)
  • A organization can have many contacts (employees)
  • A group can have many contacts.

What i have:

  • Contact(Id, PersonId (FK), OrganizationId (FK), EmployerId (FK, self reference))
  • Person(Id, FirstName, LastName, Birthday)
  • Organization(Id, Name, Founded)
  • Group(Id, Name)
  • ContactGroup(Id, ContactId (FK), GroupId (FK))
  • Email(Id, ContactId (FK), Name)
  • Address(Id, ContactId (FK), Street, City, ZipCode, Country)

What bothers me the most is that the contact entity has one organization or one person, and also a self reference (EmployerId) if a organization has employees (which are also contact entities) and vice versa.

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Is this a problem or see you a better way?