I need your opinion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anon

I'm just starting out in PHP and would like some opinions on the following questions:

I'm building a web site and will allow people to upload one .jpg file. My question is, is it better/easier to just store the whole image into MySQL or can I have the database insert the image as follows:

<img src=<?PHP CID?>.jpg">
Where CID is the ID number of that person's row in the database. Actually, i'm not even quite sure if this can be done. I've done it in ColdFusion though.

I am allowing people to select their interests from a list (they can select multiple interests). Currently, my database holds 7 interests (labelled I1 to I7 in the Interests table). My dilemma is what happens if some one chooses 8 interests (what happens to the one extra interest) - do I lose it? Is there a better way to go about this?

Thanks,
Mark

Anon

I like to store my images in the database. Also, for the amount of images selected, you can loop thru them , and if it is greater than 7 then kick back an error. Hope this helps.

Bill
http://www.freephpstuff.com

Anon

Currently, my database holds 7 interests (labelled I1 to I7 in
the Interests table). My dilemma is what happens if some one
chooses 8 interests (what happens to the one extra interest)
- do I lose it? Is there a better way to go about this?

There is a far better way to do this: you need a separate table
linking users and interests. (This is basic normalized rdbms design,
so you probably would benefit from any of the sql tutorials floating
around the web at devshed, webmonkey, and for all I know here too!)

So you would have:

create table users
(
user_id serial, -- or however your dbms defines an auto-number
public_id text, -- e.g. email address, who they currently sign in as
name text
-- other boring stuff such as address, salary...
);

create table interests
(
interest_id serial,
description text
);

create table user_interests
(
interest_id int4,
user_id int4
);

Now a user can have any number of interests, and you can also do other nice things like say

select users.name from users, user_interests, interests where users.user_id = user_interests.user_id and user_interests.interest_id = interests.interest_id and interests.description = 'php programming';

to get a list of names for everyone who is interested in php programming.

Anon

I would not store images in a database, because you are not going to use the database functions on it anyway.
You will never do "select * from table where image_data =45";

So in the end all you get is a fancy filesystem stored in a database.

What happens is that whenever you access an image, the database has to read the data from disk, then pass it to php, which can then pass it to the webserver, who can then pass it to the browser.

If you store the images on disk, you can use a database to find the location of the file, and pass the filename to the browser, which will then ask the webserver to fetch the file. The webserver can then open the file from disk and pass the data to the browser. That saves a lot of time and resources.