Prescriptive design rules
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:20:56 -0400
Message-ID: <EbnBi.1216$3Y1.852_at_newssvr17.news.prodigy.net>
This is a post from comp.databases.mysql:
<<let's say I want to ask a survey question, with checkboxes:
What animals do you like?
[] giraffe
[] elephant
[] donkey
...
I'd possibly create a single column named "like" and store each
response as a comma delimited string:
giraffe,donkey
elephant,donkey
etc
But further, let's say I have a question with checkboxes and also radio buttons:
Please select which animals you own, and tell us how much you like each:
[] cat () low () medium () high
[] dog () low () medium () high
[] rat () low () medium () high
...
What's the best table design to store that? E.g., I could have a
column named "own" and another column named "rate". Or I could have a
column named "cat" which might contain:
yes,low
and another column named "dog" which might contain: no
and another column named "rat" which might contain: yes,high
etc. But neither of those seems quite right to me.
I'm obviously thinking of using one flat table for the whole survey, is that a very wrong thing to do? I'm assuming that using a flat table will naturally make it easier to export in spreadsheet format. I'm also not concerned about the memory usage of a flat file.>>
If you could provide 10 prescriptive design rules to a front-end developer,
what would they be? Or just 5?
Evan
Received on Thu Aug 30 2007 - 01:20:56 CEST