I'm developing an application that is going to deal with information about different animals, and breeds of those animals. So far it is quite straight forward, I've created four tables, [Species] (containing a ID and name) [Breed] (also containing an ID, Name and relative link to the Species) [Owner] (ID, basic details about the owner such as name etc) [Animal] (An ID and a relative link to the owner and breed) People searching for horses/appoloosa's (species and breed) will be concerned with how tall they are, however someone who is searching for information about horses/quarterhorses will not be concerned with it's height but how fast it can run a quarter mile. The quarter mile may or may not apply to the appoloosa. Administrators using the application will have to be able to create attributes for the breeds on the fly, they will be based on a few various types of data. e.g. shorttext (for names, this will be stored as a varchar) longtext (for descriptions, stored as text) numeric (stored as an int) bullet lists check boxes drop lists etc These attributes will need to be given names and be assigned to breeds. The end users will fill these out when they add new horses to the database. My question is: How do I store the data from the attributes? Because each attribute will need to store it in a different way, do I create a table for each type of attribute? (Varchar, text, int etc), do I create a table for each individual attribute (Names, Heights etc) or do I somehow store all the data in one table (text for all the entries, although I may be storing short numbers, short descriptions, large amounts of text and abstracted radio buttons). The development platform is PHP with either MySQL or Postgres as needed. -- Sam Richardson - Web Developer, Outwide Limited DDI: +64 4 381-6841 sam.richardson@outwide.co.nz Tel: +64 4 381-6820, Fax: +64 4 381-6821 www.outwide.com Level 6, 61-63 Taranaki Street, Wellington, New Zealand ---- Warning: Confidential information may be contained in this message and any associated attachments. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not copy, send on or retain this message. Please delete it and notify the sender by reply email, thank you. ---- -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
