Thanks for your comments Chris and Rob... Chris you have great points to
make, my ears are wide open...
The reason I thought about storing the array in a blob is because every test generated will be different. the 102 question test will be generate randomly from a bank of 500 questions.. That means that the order of questions will also be different... So I would like to find a way to store that unique test for the student or administrator to review..
I do understand PHP & MySQL very well... But I am no master, that's why I was asking... Any other ideas or recommendations for this... Words of wisdom are also welcome :o)
So thanks for your input, Joe
I think the point they're trying to get across here, and the way I would do something like this is such...
Setup a table in your db for questions, and for each question you have a unique id assigned to it. Now, when you want to generate a test...
SELECT * FROM dbName.tableName LIMIT 120 ORDER BY RAND
(SQL from the top of my head, so don't trust it. ;)
Assign this test a id of some sort (random, whatever), and dump the question ID's into another table with the associated test id. Now you're not repeating the questions numerous times in your db, you have a reference, reduced the size of your db, and given your app a bit more speed when looking up the tests later on.
Yes, a bit more involved than this, but that's the watered down version.
Just my $0.02...grain of salt sold separately.
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