I couldn't think of a better term for what I want to do... I am building a CMS for news stories. Often news stories are related to each other, or need to be grouped by content. I need a simple way to manage storyId relationships - in both directions.
Thinking about the business logic to implement this is a bit confusing, because if you say story f is related to story b, and b is already related to c,d,e, then do I need aditional records for f-c, f-d, f-e? It gets worse if story f is related to g,h,i, and k is related to l,m,n and then you relate f to k... then you'd have to insert additional 9 (or would it be 12) records for the cross-product of all combinations of all the relationships. Or would you? And I can't think of how you'd handle this at the DB level (I'd have to loop in PHP and have 9 inserts?) My first thought was: CREATE TABLE storyRelationship( relId INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, storyId1 INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL INDEX, storyId2 INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL INDEX ); so, for a given target story ID I would need a query that has something like... ... WHERE storyId1 = targetId OR storyId2 = targetId Another way I thought of has its own problems - CREATE TABLE storyRelationship ( relId INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, storyIdList TEXT }; of which a record would look something like: relId 5 storyIdList '46,59,89,94,213' but then I would need to do a lot of string parsing to get related stories, and I have to believe that a query with a 'LIKE %id%' clause is going to be a lot slower than one with an OR looking on two indexed rows. Any suggestions? --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
