[thelist] Re: Relational DB Help

[Dave Zero]

> From: "David Kutcher" <david_kutcher at hotmail.com>
>
> In your example, lets say that every article has an author, a title, a
type,
> an id number, subject, and big text field for content.
>

David,
Thanks for the well-presented help on how to structure the tables; I believe
that makes good sense and it's a good basis to work from. I have a question
on the point above, though, "big text field for content".

I've been told repeatedly that we don't want to store the page content in
the db table itself, that it's better to store a link to the article in the
db table instead. This way, not only do you not weigh down the db with these
huge memo entries, your static html pages exist in their own right to be
indexed for searchability, and you don't have to dynamically generate the
page each time it's requested, saving time and server resources.

In addition, the way we present our articles (as part of a unified page
structure including contextual menus of related articles and off-site
resources), the only way storing the content in a db table would work would
be to use it as an include into the page.

What are your (and others') thoughts on this? How might I structure the
model differently if we were storing links instead of memo-size articles?

Dave Zero