On Nov 17, 2010, at 7:42 AM, èæ wrote:
I plan to design a small survey/poll system similar to
polldaddy<http://polldaddy.com/>
.
And I have some confusion in designing the database for the multiple/
single
choice questions. Of course, it is possible to use one table to
store the
question title and another table to store the choice item(one
record for
each choice item).
As you have a many-to-one relationship of answers to questions, two
tables would be necessary in a normalized database.
My main concern is that whether we can place the choices together in
the
same table(and in one ) with the question title. I guess it can be
faster to
read from one table than reading from two table.
It is possible, but really, why bother? It's not a very time consuming
function whether you join two tables or read from one and end up
parsing the results. String parsing can be expensive, too.
And my idea is to use a delimiter to separate the choices. And the
handling
of the choices are done in the php script. But what delimiter should
be
used?
You can easily choose any character and just make sure your responses
never include that character, or escape it somehow (eg. via \ )
Can anyone help? Thanks!
I really don't think you gain much, if anything, by having a single
table in this instance. The retrieval is trivial for the sql engine,
vs creating parsing code in PHP which may be trouble-prone or
convoluted.
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