[thelist] [PHP-DB] Tricky Database Question

Sam Richardson sam.richardson at outwide.co.nz
Thu Jul 17 17:11:11 CDT 2003


I'm developing an application that is going to deal with information about
different animals, and breeds of those animals.

So far it is quite straight forward, I've created four tables,

[Species] (containing a ID and name)
[Breed] (also containing an ID, Name and relative link to the Species)
[Owner] (ID, basic details about the owner such as name etc)
[Animal] (An ID and a relative link to the owner and breed)

People searching for horses/appoloosa's (species and breed) will be
concerned with how tall they are, however someone who is searching for
information about horses/quarterhorses will not be concerned with it's
height but how fast it can run a quarter mile. The quarter mile may or may
not apply to the appoloosa.

Administrators using the application will have to be able to create
attributes for the breeds on the fly, they will be based on a few various
types of data.

e.g. shorttext (for names, this will be stored as a varchar)
longtext (for descriptions, stored as text)
numeric (stored as an int)
bullet lists
check boxes
drop lists
etc

These attributes will need to be given names and be assigned to breeds. The
end users will fill these out when they add new horses to the database.

My question is: How do I store the data from the attributes? Because each
attribute will need to store it in a different way, do I create a table for
each type of attribute? (Varchar, text, int etc), do I create a table for
each individual attribute (Names, Heights etc) or do I somehow store all the
data in one table (text for all the entries, although I may be storing short
numbers, short descriptions, large amounts of text and abstracted radio
buttons).

The development platform is PHP with either MySQL or Postgres as needed.


--
Sam Richardson - Web Developer, Outwide Limited
DDI: +64 4 381-6841 sam.richardson at outwide.co.nz
Tel: +64 4 381-6820, Fax: +64 4 381-6821 www.outwide.com
Level 6, 61-63 Taranaki Street, Wellington, New Zealand
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