Creating database table

Question

I am creating a database table for investigations and i need to log the person who reported the incident, this could be a record from the supplier or user tables. The easiest way to do this would be to have both a suppleir and a user id column in my investigations table but that seems wrong, what's a better way to do this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You could have another two tables - IncidentsReportedBySupplier (IncidentID, SupplierID) and IncidentsReportedByUser (IncidentID, UserID) - which would remove the empty columns.

But this has disadvantages too. You can then potentially have incidents which aren't reported by anybody.