Thank you for the opinion, Alban. The names are the least of my worries, i typed them without thinking. And its portuguese. :-)
If, using that design, i had a different table with something like arq_types { id_arq_type, descr } that i could somehow connect to the generic table (the one with the common fields), how could i go about querying those tables for all the results of a specific type, for example? Or maybe i could add a "table_name" field on that arq_type table?
Tim:
Dont consider this to be strictly for archeology, i mean in a generic sense that if we have several data sets with common fields, if we could divide them into several tables, one with common fields, and the others with fields related to each type. My doubt was regarding how to have a separate table with "types" that could be used to help query the "common fields table" and fetch the corresponding table of that specific type. I understand its a bit ungrateful for you guys to understand what i mean, considering that i am probably making things even more confusing. :-)
> I was looking for an opinion on the actual table structure. :-) How should i > build the data set? Is my second example ok? The first is the long version > but i wanted to put together all the common fields to both types of "sites" > and then (maybe) build tables to accomodate the specific fields so there are > no empty columns on the table if i put everything in the same table.
> [...]
That's way too fuzzy for good advice. Few people build data sets on archaeological sites, and even those probably don't use all the same structure.