Storing an Academic Semester

[trb5016]

Should I have a separate table designated to holding semesters (Summer 2009, Fall 2009, Spring 2010)



I have been just storing it flat. IE for each record you select a semester and year (rather than selecting a Semester and Year Foreign Key)

This leads to a lot of duplicate Semester/Years, though making it's own table will only reduce the column count of subsequent tables by 1.

Thoughts?

[Matrix]

It's not worth it, IMO. If you use 1, 2... for Spring, Summer, they are only two integer fields. You can also use something like 20091, 20092 to store year and season in one field.