That's not "good database design", it's relational dogma. Good database design involves understand what data needs to be stored and *how it's going to be accessed*, which John hasn't told us in detail. If you don't need to access individual point relationally, and only are going to process entire polygons, storing them in a blob will be a better solution.
--Ned. http://nedbatchelder.com -----Original Message----- From: Clay Dowling [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 2:28 PM To: sqlite-users@sqlite.org Subject: Re: [sqlite] BLOB versus table storage [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > CREATE TABLE polygons (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, externalref INTEGER, > pointcount INTEGER, pointlist BLOB) > > When I insert data to this table, I have to write a binary list of x,y > coordinates in a sequential memory region before storing in the database. > Getting information back from the database requires a conversion in the > opposite direction. Typically these lists contain 10-20 points, so they > are not very large. > > This currently works, but I'm wondering if it would be better to create a > new table for the points and reference the polygon primary key: Create the second table. There shouldn't be any question about this. That's just good database design. Clay Dowling Opinionated Programmer -- Lazarus Notes from Lazarus Internet Development http://www.lazarusid.com/notes/ Articles, Reviews and Commentary on web development
