If there are lots of differences then maybe the_woodsman's idea may help. Or, if the info is completely different then two tables is probably right.
However, if the information required for both is somewhat similar (eg name, address, tel no, email etc), then I would definitely suggest one single table. Even if you have to make a couple of extra fields specific to students or teachers, it's still better in one table. It's so much more flexible and easier to integrate into the rest of your application. With of course the added bonus that once a student becomes a teacher, you can just change the flag :-) Say, for example, you want to send newletters: one to teachers, another to students and then a third one to everyone. You can essentially use the same code. With regards performance, don't even think about that being a problem. MySQL for example would handle tens of thousands of records without even blinking, especially if all the data was indexed in one single table. HTH On Jun 12, 2:20 am, Cheeze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm planning for a project for schools. As you might imagine there are > mainly two groups of users - Students and Teachers. > > I'm at the stage of designing the database tables and was wondering if > having separate tables for students and teachers might yield better > performance than having a single table with a column indicating the > user as a student/teacher. > > I'm thinking that having separate tables might improve concurrency > when many students and teachers are using the site at once (think read/ > write locks) since they are using different tables. > > Granted, I'm not writing the app for millions of users, but if it > helps to improve the performance, it'll translate to better user > experience. And I guess there are others out there who are curious > about it as well. > > Thanks. > > P.S. Kudos to the Cake team for coming up with RC1 of 1.2. Yet another > great release. Thanks to all who made this possible! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
