Basic Database Design: List of Type Instances

Question

Basic Database Design: List of Type Instances

This is a beginner's question about database design. Let's say we have a blog blog with many users, each with multiple blog posts. We want to quickly find all articles written by a given user. We could search the post table for all blog posts with a given user id. We could also design a user table to have a list of user posts. This would mean perhaps storing a comma-separated string of message IDs. What is the correct way to do this?

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database-design

user442920 Apr 28 15 at 21:41

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Dour high arch · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-29T00:37:17+0000

You are looking for

Reservation (storing the same data more than once) Anomalies (changing one binding changes another) Cycles (changing A changes B, which changes C, which changes A) Redesign (adding or removing a field requires changing other fields) Offsets (different ways ask the same question give different answers)

The typical form of normalization is named and is usually quite difficult to do, but you can improve your design by implementing the lower ones.

You haven't provided us with enough information to recommend a schema for you, but "keeping a comma-separated string of message IDs" is not the right thing to do if you need to differentiate between mail IDs. If that's what you want, you should consider design, for example:

Users
userID    other user fields ..
   100    Charlie
   101    Edith

Articles
articleID  userID  pathOrWhatever...
     1000     100  http://example.com/stuff
     1001     100  http://example.com/moreStuff
     1002     101  http://example.com/somethingElse

This project can get articles from users or from users from articles from database commands.

Basic Database Design: List of Type Instances

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