I am sorry to keep asking these questions, but I have found a lot of helpful suggestions from this community, so this is where I turn!
I have a rather involved user survey that collects a variety of information, including age & gender, education levels, and so on. On some of the survey questions, the user can select multiple options. This information is then going to be cross-referenced with vendor profiles of the same survey questions and information will be specifically spawned to users where there are matches. At first, I simply loaded a column for each survey into my user_profiles table, each relevant survey column as a foreign key to the actual survey question tables that contain the question text, weight, etc. As users will be able to select multiple options, however, I do not think this approach will feasible as I will have to deal with creating lists for multiple selections, and that's just something I do not want to do (and which I have been previously advised not to do). So my solution--as suggested on these forums on another topic--is to create "lookup" tables for the multiple-entries where each row represents a user selection. Now my question: As most, but not all of the survey questions will have the possibility of multiple selections, should I go ahead and create lookup tables for each survey question, regardless of whether or not it will take multiple answers? And if so, what will be the performance hit, if any, when actually interacting with all of these tables? Will performing several joins (say, more than 6) manifest in a significant performance lag, or will this actually speed up the process as opposed to running through the entire user_profiles table? I will have several thousand user profiles... Other options? Thanks as always! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Download the latest ColdFusion 8 utilities including Report Builder, plug-ins for Eclipse and Dreamweaver updates. http;//www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs%5adobecf8%5Fbeta Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:289937 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
