How do people create re-usable databases?

Question

How do people make reusable databases that can be used for many products?

For example,if we have a database designed for a school...Can it be easily modified to be given to a college?

What is the way to create a database that can be used as a product to give solution to many customers with coding just once?

Thanks

Answer 1

Usually, when people do this, they have multiple clients in the same industry. So if you are an ecommerce web developer, then you are going to run across the same products, order, order details type of table scenario over and over again. When this happens, it's a breeze to build a starter database.

Answer 2

There's no simple silver bullet for this. You just need to keep your database design general enough, but try to avoid over-generalization as that usually leads to nightmares in maintenance and other nasty pitfalls.

With experience, you'll start to appreciate a perfect balance between generalized and specialized. That's the key to understandable and reusable code / database design.