I guess I better beef up on my database design skills.
Thanks to everyone.
Joel
"Dave Watts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
000601bfe055$9cc19ec0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:000601bfe055$9cc19ec0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
: This is not the right approach. You'll want to use an intersection table, as
: Mark suggested. The point of using an intersection table is to allow you to
: easily construct many-to-many relationships within your database. If you
: want to associate one item with many categories, and associate one category
: with many items, that's a many-to-many relationship and you'll want a table
: between item and category which contains all of the intersections between
: items and categories.
:
: I can't overemphasize the importance of correct database design to the
: success of application development. If you've come to CF from a
: non-programming background, as a lot of people have, you might not have
: learned enough about relational databases. CF makes it very easy to learn
: how to program, but it doesn't supply the knowledge you need to build
: well-designed database applications. The sooner you learn that stuff, the
: better your programming life will be. I can tell you this through my own
: personal experience. I started programming with CF, and didn't know very
: much about database design - and I had lots of problems until I buckled down
: and learned how to use a relational database.
:
: To take your situation as an example, there are several potential problems
: with storing lists of foreign keys within a field. If you were to delete a
: category, you'd have to retrieve the list of categories stored within each
: item, modify each list that contains the category to be deleted, then update
: those lists. That's a lot of unnecessary work, and doesn't allow the
: database to manage itself, as it can with declarative referential integrity
: rules. If you simply wanted to list all of the items within a given
: category, that would require a similar procedure. On the other hand, if you
: simply add an intersection table to your database, you can use that to
: perform these operations quickly and efficiently.
:
: Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
: http://www.figleaf.com/
: voice: (202) 797-5496
: fax: (202) 797-5444
:
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