[thelist] Relational DB Help

David Kutcher david_kutcher at hotmail.com
Sat Feb 23 13:29:00 CST 2002


Dave-

my pleasure.  as to the big text field... well, it all depends on your
situation.

indexing, querying, key words, etc... all valid concerns when you design a
content-rich site.

will you be using a database query to find key words, or do you envision
using a program such as ht-dig to find them?

sometimes it's best to make them referencable but leave the actual "big
content" in a text document that can be <? include ?> into a dynamically
created page and then use a search tool to index and query the text blocks.

but if you don't envision key words and such, I see very little reason
beyond database bloat to separate them.  it shouldn't slow down your
database since as long as you don't query using * you're not analyzing the
entire table.

maybe the best practice for you would be creating a CMS that allows you to
create all of the stuff mentioned earlier, including a textarea for
inputting the articles, but that writes out the article to a uniqueID.txt
file and then writes that text file's name into the article table.

that way there's little margin of error for duplicate .txt files and/or
misnamed files being referenced.

all depends on your situation.

David
www.confluentforms.com




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