[thelist] Re: Relational DB Help

[Nick Wilson]

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* and then Dave Zero declared....
> 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

Forgive me but that's a crock of...
The idea is not to store the html in the db if possible, just the text.
It makes no odds how much text.

> 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.

What you save here you pay there... If you plan on having all you pages
static then there is virtually no point in having the db. *that is what
it's for* storing data. The time spent dynamically generating the page
will be negligible for most sites and if you get a serious amount of
traffic there are great techniques to cache the output of a dynamically
generated page.

> 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.

Templates, templates, templates :-) check out this explanation of 'three
tier structure' http://www.explodingnet.com/articles/latest/6
and this one on 'getting started with db driven sites'
http://www.explodingnet.com/articles/latest/7

> 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?

Don't just store the links! It's next to useless.
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