What would be a good way to deal with the following...
I have a form that has 5 checkboxes on it, lets say the checkboxes are for categories, and more than one can be selected.
For example: please tell is what brochure you want [] car [] boat [] truck [] SUV [] beetle
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I don't see the 5 categories being changed, so I could create 5 fields in one table, and tally them that way, or I could create one field and put the actual value in that field and tally them that way.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here. My intuition tells me to look for the opportunity to add some data to this process... For example, what if a record were created for each brochure that needed to be processed, and suppose that in some back-end application the person fulfilling these requests completed the data in the record... Then you might justify making a separate table for each brochure (or one with a two column key)... Then you would not waste space, you could gather statistics easily with joins, and you'd satisfy both processes at once...
then again, if none of that back-end process exists, then it's probably simplest to just make an integer column and bit-map the check-boxes into it (if you want to save space)... or if you don't care about space just create a true/false column for each check box.
The short answer is - more info is needed to pick the best approach.
HTH, _M
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