Jerry, Raquel Rice has already answered your question, I'd suggest looking up some basic tutorials on relational databases. This one is pretty good: http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/MySQL/Normal
A good database design is important because it's the foundation of all the rest of your work, and you can use the power of SQL to eliminate a lot of processing loops you would otherwise have to write, whether in PHP or some other language. Char vs varchar? It probably doesn't matter, although I prefer to get my field lengths as close to the length of my data as possible, and I suspect that there has to be some processing overhead with a varchar type. Having said that a MySQL expert will probably read the post and say "Huh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. MySQL stores all chars as varchars." Welcome to the club and have fun - Miles Thompson At 03:02 PM 1/11/2002 -0800, Jerry Leonard wrote: >Hi, > >I am really new to MySQL and am wondering this: > >I understand how to make a database and tables but what I don't understand >is when to make a row an "int" with auto_increment or just a plain "int". >Or why would you use varchar(50) instead of char(50). > >Could someone please explain what is happening and why? > >Thank you >Jerry > > > >-- >PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
