Hi, This a question for the programmers out there with proper style/form.
I'm about to start my first real PHP/MySQL project, and since I want to do it correctly, I got a book to help me. It gives some basic information on RDBM's and mentions an organizational process called normalization. Because of my lack of experience, I'm unsure as to whether this is truly a standard or not. Among other criteria, it mentions that in first order normalization "No repeating groups of data are allowed". It then gives a table with 3 rows of data, and shows that one of the columns (company name) has the same entry in two of the rows. It says "this table is not in 1st normal form". For the correct way of doing it, it shows the same table, with that column changed to (company name id) and links it to another table that has two columns, company name id, and company id. Frankly, I don't understand how doing this fixes the problem, because now instead of the company name repeating (a string), the company name id (an int)repeats. Could someone explain (maybe convince is a better word) how that creates a more organized database? Now here's the paradox. The project I'm working on is for a judging system of an animation competition. Judges judge on a 1 - 10 basis. There are more than ten teams, so therefore a score will be repeated at least once. My intention was to have a column for the judges score. Am I to create a column that should be "judges score id" and have it link to a table that corresponds "judges score id" to "judges score"? That would create a table that would look like this: 1 1 2 2 3 3 and so on. I would be replacing an int with an int. What are your thoughts? Thanks, and sorry for the longwindness (just my style) Kurt --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
