[NCLUG] normalizing data

[mike cullerton]

hey folks,

 time for teaching mike more theory. how do folks here deal with data? how
extreme are you at normalizing data, and why?

 i have a database with info about some images. every image has a name and
location (directory path). some images have comments associated with them
(ultimately, all should) and each image can be the member of one or more
groups.

 so, some table structure...

 image - id, name, location, comment
 group - id, name
 image_group - image_id, group_id

another possibility is to have a separate comment table and another link
table

 image - id, name, location
 group - id, name
 image_group - image_id, group_id
 comment - id, comment
 image_comment - image_id, comment_id

so, how do y'all decide the way to break data up? what possible snags might
i run into with comments by themselves or in the image table?

thanks,
mike

 -- mike cullerton   michaelc at cullerton dot com