SecretAgentRege

I will be building the initial database to start from XML files: Just over 2,500 PARENT objects with each having anywhere from 10-100 CHILD objects, with the average being probably 25-60 child objects. After that, most creation will be human input. Probably starting off steeper (especially child objects) and then hitting a plateau at about 1:20 new parent:child creation spread across the objects; at the flatest part, probably an average 1-10 children per week; at the steepest probably 50-100 children a week (before plateau). As far as these new CHILD table I spoke of (UNDER the ORIGINAL CHILD), I will probably not do this for the editing reason I spoke of. Say each PARENT is a book, and each CHILD is a chapter. Why break each chapter into another CHILD of each paragraphs linked to the chapters? When you want to edit your chapter, you probably do not want to have it seperated into paragraphs. While the actual information will be unrelated objects (probably more like the chapters in the example above), when that field is edited, I would like all information within that section to be edited much like a wiki would. This seems to lend itself to have all this information in one field, rather than have them as seperate objects in a different table. Does that make more sense. Also, I can't help but continue to thank you guys for your help. Thanks!

Thanks for the help fenway, I think I might go for the big text field, for a fe reasons. One of which, users might be able to edit the contents of this field all at once, even if it appears to be different entries... the best I can think of is like a wiki of sorts. Another thing to theorize: Say I have a table that holds contact information. Each row consists of a person's Name, Telephone, Address, etc.. But say users want to add a unlimited multitude of Telephone Numbers, cells, home, office, vacation, etc. etc. (bad example, but you get the picture). Would it make more sense to have a seperate table of phone numbers that links back to each person in the original table, or just have each telephone number they add listed in the 'telephone' field with some common seperator so any middlewhere and tell when one phone number ends and the next begins? Hmm.. i guess that example might lend itself to the seperate table... which would contradict my original thought process... darn.

hi wickning1, The child objects will never be linked to more than one parent, but they could contain similar, though not exact, data. However, now I've run into a situation, as to the best method to go about the following situation: The CHILD object could contain its own CHILD objects; which could be between 0-10+ avg per original CHILD object, which would be another table up to 10 times the size of the original CHILD table. These new child objects wouldn't be too complex, with probably 2 or 3 data fields, and so I must ask, would it be more beneficial to stick these perhaps as text/XML in the original CHILDs table? How big can a text field be if I was to go this route? Or is this something that is neglegant? Thanks, Rege

D'oh! Yes, table. Not seperate databases. Thanks so much for your reply! Well, when I think of how to index the table, I usually think of how I will be searching for the data. Since I will be primarily searching by the link to the parent, and then sorting those linked to the parent by a process of one or two fields.. so the link and sorting fields would be the ones to index. Does that make sense? (Sorry, I'm completely self-taught, so I sometimes second-guess my process because no one has told me one way is better than another). Rege

Hello, I'm planning out a database, however, it has the potential to be quite large, and I don't know how large is too large. While I've worked with MYSQL quite alot, I have never really come across the best database planning, so my plan below is up for criticism. Essentially, I will have one PARENT database containing general data about a particular object. There will then be another CHILD database that will have data about objects linked to the parent object. [i][You can think of it like the PARENT is a forum post, and the CHILD are the replies, though I'm not designing a forum, but you get the idea].[/i] My situation is that the PARENT database could have thousands of objects/rows. Each parent object could have 5-100+ child objects. So, if the PARENT database holds 6000 objects, and each object has 60 CHILD objects, that would make the PARENT db with 6,000 rows, and the CHILD database with 360,000 rows; all with the potential to grow 2, 3, 5x the size. I have never dealt with a database quite of this size. Is this too much and should I think about another method to break up the CHILDren db's? Thanks, Rege

Thanks for the great post redbullmarky! I think I'm getting the mod_rewrite, but, as it seems, it would be impossible to rewrite the url '[b]http://www.dummy.com/people/person.php?id=345[/b]' to '[b]http://www.dummy.com/people/George_Washington/[/b]' because the string 'George_Washington' doesn't display in the URL in the firstplace. however, with an extra column in the database to index and pull George's info, we could have strings (say titles or names) instead of id number's for links and database indexing; something like '[b]http://www.dummy.com/people/person.php?id=George_Washington[/b]' rewritten to '[b]http://www.dummy.com/people/George_Washington/[/b]' and with php.net's 404-searching technique error-catch variants of 'George_Washington' and redirect to the correct url. That make sense? I think I'm getting the technique process..

Hmm, yes. I found some additional resources, including [a href=\"http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/5610.htm\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/5610.htm[/a] which better explains the apache rewrite et al. However, this got me thinking, and though it seems far-fecthed I might as well pose the question: Would it be possible to have a page such as 'http://www.dummy.com/people/person.php?id=345' show as 'http://www.dummy.com/people/George_Washington/' in the address bar? Thanks, Regis

Hello, I was curious how sites like wikipedia (running in php) has urls like "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_washington" without any extension on them. I understand php.net's urls and 404-error searching and redirect theory, which is cool, but I don't have the knowledge on how wikipedia went about these urls? I'm not necessarily asking for a how-to, just what the process is called and how to go about it/get more information. Thanks!