[cgiapp] Re: Before I go off into a codestorm... [Mini-CRM Question]

[Mark Stosberg <suppressed>]

On 2005-05-19, Sam Tregar <suppressed> wrote:
> On Thu, 19 May 2005, Jason Purdy wrote:
>
>> So instead of widening the "people" table to support these fields
>> (and having to alter the table every time), I'm thinking of
>> developing a datapoint type of system, where you'd have one table of
>> datapoints:
>
> This is a bad idea, but it's also a very common one.  It basically
> treats a relational database as a glorified hash, storing sets of
> completely denormalized key-value pairs in giant tables.  Sometimes
> that's really what you need, but I suspect that your situation isn't
> that extreme.

I agree with Sam that keeping it simple is the way to go, based on my
experience of exploring the same kind of issue in previous projects.
Unless your project specification says that users need to be able to 
add new fields themselves, I would avoid this kind of data modeling. 

    Mark

-- 
http://mark.stosberg.com/ 


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