Hello... I am currently working on a User Account Management system. I am actually a Unix SA who is "moonlighting" at work as a MySQL DBA and web developer. I am learning a lot and enjoying the work, but I am severely lacking in database design fundamentals. I have created a couple very simple databases, but my two newest projects are getting more sophisticated. I was hoping for some DB design help with the following example...
Let's say that I have users Mary, Joe, Frank, and Dan. I also have servers panther, cheetah, jaguar and lion. The data for each account that I want to maintain is UID, GID, home directory, and default shell. In designing a table or tables to handle this example what can I make as a primary key? My idea was to have a table named mary, with a row for each server, and each column would hold the data such as UID, GID, etc. This would mean that the primary key for each row would simply be the server name. By holding all of the data, including server name, in a single table, I am not sure how I would define a primary key. I couldn't use the user name or server name as there would be duplication. I suppose I could use a dummy numeric field that is auto-incrementing, but I am not sure how good an idea this is. I think I have read somewhere that you can actually use a combination of multiple columns as a primary key or index, but this is something I am obviously not familiar with. One other concern I have is regarding performance. The database work I have done so far has been dealing with relatively miniscule amounts of data. This database table however is going to contain information for about 80 servers with somewhere around 300 users per server on average. This is quite a large number of rows from my very limited experience. I don't want to come up with a poor table design that ends up causing problems down the line. Well, that's about all I can think of at the moment. I am sure that I will have plenty more questions as this progresses. Thanks again for the feedback. Scott Nipp Phone: (214) 858-1289 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http:\\ldsa.sbcld.sbc.com -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]