Re: Database design - AGAIN

Josh, Jonathan ..

Thanks for your replies.
You mail was exactly what I was hoping for - your best practise opinion.

I do have a grasp of the theory involved with SQL but your input on
those 'other' constraints like time, language, longevity etc was just
what I was interested in.

I'll be using smaller tables with appropriate join tables and PHP.
Just for interests sake I'll be using Dia to plan the schema.
I prefer to use the UML drawing tools instead of the ER ones.

Thank you.
Best regards
Rudi.

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> On Monday 23 June 2003 22:19, Rudi Starcevic wrote:
> > I"m not sure whether to have on larger table or 2 smaller one with a
> > join table.
>
> Theory says you are better off with the join tables. Practical
> reality agrees with this. It takes a bit more work to write your
> select statements, but the data is better for at least these two reasons:
> 1) You won't have a lot of empty columns.
> 2) You will be able to add, rename, and remove features pretty easily.
> There are more reasons, but they are not immediately obvious to the
> untrained DBA. (Words like "data integrity" and "data consistency"
> start to mean things when you become trained.)
>
> With that said, it sounds like you are really intermediate with
> database design. If you were a beginner, and if you barely
> understood what a table was, (and if you were the guy who would be
> using it all the time,) I would probably suggest you use the former
> method. It will work pretty well until you want to add more features
> or until you start worrying about your database size. At that point,
> I would explain how and why to use joins, and how to convert your
> data over to the new design.
>
> - --
> Jonathan Gardner <jgardner(at)jonathangardner(dot)net>
> (was jgardn(at)alumni(dot)washington(dot)edu)
> Live Free, Use Linux!
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