» MySQL Table Advise
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So your all set up to create your first dynamic website and you plan on using MySQL to store all your sites data, nice choice.
Here are a couple pointers on creating your table.
- Define your datatypes correctly.
- Name the table something easy to remember.
- Name the columns something easy to remember.
1. *Primary Key* A primary key will keep all your rows of data unique. This will make it much easier to maintain your data later on. If you fail to use a primary key data corruption when updating your site is likely.
create table key_example (id int(6) not null auto_increment, more table definitions here, primary key(id));
This table is using 'id' as the primary key. Setting up the primary key as an int and using auto_increment make this a very easy way to use a primarty key.
2. *Datatypes* Defining all datatypes correctly will allow you to use the data with all programming languages. Setting a column to a number type will allow you to run math operations on those values. Failure to do this may cause more work for you later, so just define your fields properly.
3. *Table Name* Naming your table something relevent to what the data is used for will help you out when you have 40+ tables in a single database. I dont know how many times I have had to ask other developers what they named a table for a specific job because they named it something like 'XYZ123'. This will save headaches when you are working on large scale projects
4. *Column Names* See Table Name above.
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