Hello olinux, If I were in your shoes, I would put not only paths to images into a separate table, but also a field called "content" and probably title, summary, author and linked all this stuff together via ID-like fields which are primary keys in those new tables. Then articles table can be searched through much faster, and title, summary, author data can be quickly retrieved using primmary keys ONLY when this data is needed. So you first search a very compact table where most of the fields are indexes or parts of indexes, and THEN, using primary keys, retrieve big pieces of data which you do not have to search through (and nothing, I guess, works faster in MySQL than retrieval of a single record by it's primary key). Run your queries with EXPLAIN, it will probably explain it less verbously than me :).
Regards, Tom Monday, April 22, 2002, 6:29:52 AM, you wrote: o> Hello, o> I have a table with a large number of news articles. o> Articles of type 'feature' (identified in the o> article_type field) will have the path to an image o> associated with the article stored. The question is o> whether to 1) add a field to the database that most o> records will not use OR 2) add a table to hold image o> path names and require a JOIN in order to retrieve. o> I am thinking that the join query will be best. Thanks o> for any help. o> olinux o> Table setup is: o> CREATE TABLE articles ( o> id int(12) NOT NULL auto_increment, o> type varchar(15) NOT NULL default '', o> region smallint(1) NOT NULL default '0', o> date varchar(35) NOT NULL default '0', o> author varchar(30) NOT NULL default '', o> title varchar(90) NOT NULL default '', o> summary varchar(255) NOT NULL default '', o> content text NOT NULL, o> keywords varchar(150) NOT NULL default '', o> filename varchar(30) NOT NULL default '', o> PRIMARY KEY (id,id) o> ) TYPE=MyISAM; --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
