Table with multiple foreign keys -- only one not null

Question

I'm trying to design a system where an administrator will have to approve changes to the data and other various administrative tasks -- add a user, add an admin etc.

My idea is to have a notification table that contains these notifications, but the problem is that a notification can be any of the previously mentioned types, ie it's data is stored in one of many tables. Here is a picture to describe my current plan -- note I'm sure that it's not a proper ER diagram.

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Also, the data goes into a pending table, that reflects the table it will eventually wind up in, provided the data is approved -- it's a staging ground of sorts. So, a pending_user is a user that is not in the user table. And as you can see the user table, amongst others, is not shown here, but one can use their imagination.

I'm concerned that the multiple null values in the pending table will have adverse effects that I'm not totally aware of, such as increased space usage and possibly increase query time. Also, I'm not sure how I'll implement the retrieval of these notifications. My naive approach is to select the first X notifications, analyze the rows to find the non-null column, retrieve the appropriate data and then load all the data in a response.

Is there a more straight forward pattern for this type of problem?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

I think, the traditional way is to provide various levels of access/read/write rights to users. These access rights define what actions a user can and can't perform. In this traditional approach if a user has access to a certain function, he can do it without further approval.

Also, traditionally there are some kind of audit logs that contain a trace of all important changes to the data. With such logs it would be possible to know who made a change (and when).

If you need to build a two-stage system, where a change has to go through an approval, I'd add a flag column to each important table that would indicate that values in the given row are not final and have to be approved. The table would store all historical changes to the data and with the help of this flag the system would know which variant is the latest approved version and which variant is pending and waiting for approval.

I would not try to make a single universal table that would hold data related to changes in many different tables. Each table is different and approval process for each table is likely to be different. I doubt that you'll have more than a dozen entities that are important enough to go through this approval process.