I work in the insurance industry right now and we have a concept of rate tables which we display the rates that is applicable to a customer as per his demographics such as age and tobacco usage.
For one particular product we have two rate tables depending on whether the customer is a tobacco user or not. The appropriate rates are shown to customer on the screen depending on his answer to the question about his tobacco usage.
My confusion is how to store the fact whether the customer is a tobacco user or not. I know we should not create redundant columns in a database table Every time the customer makes a selection and enroll's in a policy his action is recorded in the transactions table. Would it be redundant to create a column in this transactions table that records whether the customer is a tobacco user? Because the rate that the customer selected is recorded and this can be matched to the corresponding rate table to identify whether the user is a tobacco user or not.
But then later, when we have to create reports about customer demographics. In order to identify the tobacco usage status of a customer we would need to execute two queries and if the 'tobacco user' column is present we would need only one.
What is your opinion?
For one particular product we have two rate tables depending on whether the customer is a tobacco user or not. The appropriate rates are shown to customer on the screen depending on his answer to the question about his tobacco usage.
But then later, when we have to create reports about customer demographics. In order to identify the tobacco usage status of a customer we would need to execute two queries and if the 'tobacco user' column is present we would need only one.
What is your opinion?
No comments:
Post a Comment