Hello all,

I got a chance to peak into a database system. Part of its design is
rather unfamiliar to me. When I look at the diagram generated by SQL
Server, there are many floating tables. Eventually it turns out that
these many floating tables are actually not floating. Their table
names relate to fields (as TableID) in other tables. In this case,
you can get a handle to one of such tables by search TableID columns
in other tables.

To be more specific, the database is a microarray database implemented
in SQL Server 2000. They have a table called MICROARRAYS. In this
table, there is a column called table_id. These table_ids are in fact
table names of a bunch of other tables.

My questions are

1) Is this good relational design?
2) How well is this kind of design supported in SQL Server?
3) Are there better alternatives?

Any other comment or link to helpful resources will also be
appreciated.

Thanks,

Eric Wu