So I'm currently designing a database for a web site and intra net for my campuses student radio. Since I'm not getting paid for this and I'm doing this in my free time I kinda want to take my time and have the system setup as "perfectly" as any one college student can.
I'm currently debating on how I want to store all the songs in the system. Namely I'm not quite sure which way will eek the most performance out of MySQL. My plan so far is quite normalized, a songs table with 1:1 relationships with an Albums, Artists, and Genres table. The big benefits I see from this is when I'm building the intra net application I'll want to pull just all of the artists or all of the albums, etc. However I feel like I'm encountering issues with where to store the "year" field of an mp3 (do I want it on the album, song, or both) along with issues like printing everything out at once. The only other way I can think of thats relatively efficient is to have the singular songs table and have indexes on albums, artists, and genres. My question, more out of curiosity than necessity, is which of these would be more efficient (given that I'll be using the InnoDB storage engine)? Other relevant facts include it'll be using the latest, stable release of MySQL 5 and I'll be developing in PHP5 (through CakePHP's database abstraction layer). -- Thanks and Gig 'Em! Daniel Cousineau http://www.terminalfuture.com/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcousineau [EMAIL PROTECTED]