[thelist] Re: relational DB help

[Dave Zero]

>
> 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?

I'm unfamiliar with that program. But in truth, I'd planned to use db
queries - and I'd only ben thinking keyword searches within the title of an
article; hadn't even thought of searching by keyword in the content area.
That is a really good idea though, and I like the notion. It definitely
lends strength to the "store the content in the db" argument.

> 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.

This sounds like at least the beginnings of an excellent idea. So have the
content in the db table, but also have it as a static html page. Then you
could do a keyword search on the db field, but what the viewer read would be
somewhere else, an associated html file, like.

Forgive me and have patience - I am new to this stuff.
>
> If he had a dedicated MySQL server I don't think he'd have a problem
> although I wouldnt attempt it. Does he have /that/ much content?

It is a mySQL data source we're using - in fact I'm going to be working
through the nuts and bolts of it here on my members.evolt.org space as soon
as I get that sorted out. I don't have that much content now - only around
80 articles. But we are looking to increase that number, and have a system
that can deal with a larger amount of content.

Thank you all for the input you've given me so far and continuing to hold my
hand through the initial steps - I feel like I've scratched the surface of a
huge pool of expertise and it's bubbling up in amounts I struggle to make
sense of.

Here's an idea, why don't you guys check out the site I'm running right now
and get a feel for the articles, how many there are, how big they are, how
it might be worked out. It's an apache server with some dubious connection
times. It's at http://tetrica.com, and the static list of articles is at
http://tetrica.com/tiz/index.html

Once again, thanking you all.

Dave Zero