A common problem in database design is the implementation of entities that are different physically (for instance, they share some attributes but have additional, specific, attributes), but should logically participate in the same relationships as one and the same. For instance, the customer can either be a natural person (a person, for short), or a legal person (an organization or a company). The majority of the attributes of a natural person are, of course, different from the majority of the attributes of a legal person; however, from the perspective of how they participate in business operations, they need to be considered as equal. In this session you will learn how to use specific native SQL Server functionalities to solve this particular problem: sparse columns, XML, JSON, and/or even User-defined CLR types – in an OLTP database, as well as in a star (or snowflake) schema data warehouse.