[NCLUG] normalizing data

[Charles Clarke]

Well, now you are doing what Sean was talking about, extending the
database:
Subject
Time taken
Photographer
F-Stop
...

:-)

The first question you should be asking is how you are planning on using
all this data you are gathering.  I know plenty of databases that gathered
"Name" and then wanted to use "First Name" and "Last Name".  An extra
couple of minutes at the beginning would have saved hours later.

My preference is to normalize as much as possible and then optimize
as needed(or buy a faster machine - which is usually cheaper!).

charles

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On Sun, 6 Jan 2002, mike cullerton wrote:

> 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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