[thelist] DB Design question

[rudy]

> or, assume if the record exists in this joining table that the breed is
> active, otherwise it's inactive, in which case you can drop the isactive
> column entirely.

dude, i like the way you think

that's clever

so basically, you get the active ones by doing a join, and the rows that
don't match are dropped

another advantage of this design is that there might be situations where you
could use the joining table as the "driver" in some other query to some
other table, and since it contains the primary keys of only the active ones,
it might be faster than a join which includes a condition which interrogates
an active/inactive column

still, unless this app is going to be as big as amazon or ebay, i'd probably
stick to the active/inactive column (option 1)

i wouldn't use a boolean datatype, simply because it's so poorly supported
across databases, but rather something like a tinyint or a char(1)


rudy