[NCLUG] normalizing data

mike cullerton michaelc at cullerton.com
Sun Jan 6 11:47:26 MST 2002


after thinking about this some more, i believe it's possible for me to reuse
some of the comments.

for instance, many of these images are of flowers in my yard (see
http://cullerton.com ). i retake some of the same shots throughout the
spring and summer to show how it all looks from month to month and year to
year. so, for instance, i could reuse the comment "Jean Kenneally" for shots
of that particular rose.

then, data entry might be more difficult though...

in addition to theory vs. practice, i've learned this stuff is about
weighing trade-offs as much as anything else. the tough part for me is
knowing all variables in the equation.

that's what y'all are for ;)

mmmm...,
mike

on 1/6/02 11:13 AM, quent at quent at pobox.com wrote:

> There's theory and there's practice :)
> 
> In practice sometimes you'll not follow theory about normalization for
> performance reasons.  How the data is used will affect how you want to
> model the data.
> 
> I would be tempted to stick with the first example, putting comments in
> the image table. It will save you from having to do a table join later,
> since a comment table by itself isn't usful, I suspect.
> 
> Quent
> 
> On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 09:48:17AM -0700, mike cullerton wrote:
>> 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
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 -- mike cullerton   michaelc at cullerton dot com





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