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]
