Django Database design improvement

Question

I have designed an application that has an abstract base class that describes a generic device with some common fields (Name, Date, etc...) and many inherited classes that describe the protocols and the properties of them, like:

• SNMP (Community, auth, etc...)
• HTTP (endpoint, etc...)

In addition I have many tables that contains the data collected over those described protocols and references the parent device, like below:

• SNMP_detections (id, collected_data, datetime, parent_obj [FK to SNMP])
• HTTP_detections (id, collected_data, datetime, parent_obj [FK to HTTP])

So, I was thinking about optimize the current database layout, specially the measurement tables, I'm interested in how I can use only a single table and reference from there the parent device (that can be HTTP or SNMP)...

Any suggestion?

Answer 1

If I understand correctly the point is to merge all specific measurement tables into a single generic one while still being able to point to the correct "device" parent record.

if yes, then multi-table inheritance might be what you're looking for.

Using multi-table inheritance you do have a single base "device" table with "common fields" (plus a distinct table with specific fields for each device subclass), so your generic "measurement" table just needs a foreignkey on the base "device" table.

The drawback is, of course, that you need some extra work to get the device's subclass data, but IIRC there are a couple of Django packages implementing this already.