Designing a clean database schema for a university sports club

Normalization Matters

My first draft of the schema was a mess. User data was duplicated in booking tables, and tracking membership status was a query nightmare.

The Solution

I normalized the data into three core tables: Users, Memberships, and Bookings. This allowed for:

• Single source of truth for user details.
• Flexible membership types without altering the user table.
• Faster queries for admin reports.

Good data architecture makes the backend code 50% simpler.