SQL Database Design Best Practice (Addresses)

You’re on the right track by breaking address out into its own table. I’d add a couple of additional suggestions.

  1. Consider taking the Address FK columns out of the Customers/Orders tables and creating junction tables instead. In other words, treat Customers/Addresses and Orders/Addresses as many-to-many relationships in your design now so you can easily support multiple addresses in the future. Yes, this means introducing more tables and joins, but the flexibility you gain is well worth the effort.

  2. Consider creating lookup tables for city, state and country entities. The city/state/country columns of the address table then consist of FKs pointing to these lookup tables. This allows you to guarantee consistent spellings across all addresses and gives you a place to store additional metadata (e.g., city population) if needed in the future.

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