mysql database normalisation/modeling

Question

I'm trying to move my office into a database application. Here is what I got:
_{(source: phunkei.de )}

companies and individuals inherit (1:1 relation) from clients . That is because both of them can be a "client" and receive a bill and I would like to reference to a single table in orders . There is another relationship between companies and clients: a many to many. I hope you guys have some ideas for improvements, because I'm not really sure of this.

edit: companies and individuals will have some different fields ...

Answer 1

I consider myself to be a database newbie, so take this suggestion with a grain of salt. I would personally be tempted to set this up as a star schema. Here is an example from:

Microsoft Technology: BI Dimensional Model - Star Schema

This should allow for quick query speeds (if everything is indexed correctly) and should allow you to easily add on more attributes to query. One trade-off for quick queries is updating the Fact table. This will be slower due to indexing.

This has worked well for me in past projects but, again, I am by no means a qualified database professional.