At 8/11/2002, you wrote: >I believe that what you called "intermediate table" books are calling >"table map", or something with the word "map" in it.
Hi Lloyd, Books are nice to have (you can lie down to a sofa or sit in the loo with a book), and what I started with (SAMS Teach Yourseft MySQL in 21 days) are great to start with, but they don't get you very far in design process. The best resource is to design things out on a paper and coding tests on real data. >What you have done here is extremely helpful. You don't know how much I >appreciate it, especially when I was feeling so ignored -almost like I was >"banned" or something! > >Thank you, thank you, and thank you again. Np. Nice to hear it was useful! :) >Could you please elaborate a bit on, "...use same int as you autoincrement >keys..." -for example which keys should (or must be?) be autoincremented? I meant to say that if you refer to a key from table A from another table (B) you must use the same data type in both. If you have an autoincrement key int(11) on one table and you use it as int(5) on some "intermediate table" you'll end up having problems pretty soon. There should be (can be?) only one autoincrement key per table. Autoincrements are useful for stuff that you need to refer later by id, like adding to a list of photographs, list of car parts - the autoincrement system takes cares you don't have duplicate ids and that whenever you insert a new item you'll have a new unique key. > > Heavy normalization will most likely make programming the application more > > complex, but it will pay off in speed and flexibility to change and add > > things. > >I needed to be told that. because books seem to want you to shy away from >over-normalization (beyond level 3). Well, the books don't tell much about normalizing much because the big companies take a lot of money to do it for you :) I think other reason is that writers think that keeping focus too long on one subject is not good for the reading process. Who knows. But it is not hard to normalize, and actually the further you go the more clearly you'll see the real data in your database. Pekka ------------------------- Pekka Saarinen http://photography-on-the.net ------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
