[thelist] CF: Request for Opinion

[rudy]

> (or a table with a single record, ugh).

was that teensie-weensie troll aimed at me?  okay, i'll bite

the ooak ("one of a kind") table concept has its advantages

for one thing, it makes the app portable

given that you do want an admin screen for these odds and sods pieces of
app data, it means you don't have to re-invent the esoteric code that
stores and manages this data in some external file, which surely will vary
from one scripting language to another -- just manage it like other
database data using sql calls, which is a pretty standard coding technique
that even junior coders should be comfortable with

next, and this is perhaps a "killer" advantage, consider how the data might
be used in the app

one example is exchange rate

in pulling out rows from, say, a product table, to convert the prices to
the user's currency, you simply join the ooak table into the query and
perform the calculation in sql

   select product.description
        , product.price * exchange_rate
     from products, ooak
       where product.pk in
         ( select cart.product_fk
             from cart
            where cart.userid=  n )

note how this is a cross join, with no join conditions

that means every selected product row is joined with all the rows of the
ooak table -- all one of them!

no post-processing in your script to loop over records to perform the
calculation

i have conveniently glossed over matching the user to one of several
exchange rates, but the principle remains -- it is better to do this type
of calculation in sql


rudy