How to best design address locations in any SQL Database?

Question

Overview

I\'m working on some Emergency Services reporting and mapping application for California (kind of weird, considering the fires there, right now...)

Answer 1

Is this an OLTP system and reporting system or only a reporting system? If it's only a reporting system, you can denormalize the data in a data warehouse fashion (with snowflake dimensions or not for the hierachies of geographic jurisdictions) and you'll find the reporting to be easier.

I would start from the results and work back, because it sounds to me like you are getting fed the data and you are trying to bring it into a database to support the reporting and mapping. In this case, the database schema being a traditional normalized system is not important because redundancy in the data is not something that will cause maintenance problems for users, etc.

If this seems appropriate, you want to look into the Kimball books.