structure

[alijsh]

Got this question:

What I'm trying to do is have a database of people, I'd like to divide these people in groups depending on values in their rows.
Each person has, among other things, a year and an occupation.
I'd like to be able to group them by their year, or by their occupation.

My first thought was to have one table and all the values in that table, bu that doesn't seem to efficient, although time efficiency isn't a big matter, there's just ~130 people in the database.

I'm quite new to the mysql scene and I'm having trouble with how to structure up the database, any ideas?

thanks for your help

[tomhath]

It mainly depends on whether a person can be a member of more than one group (two occupations?). If not, you can store it all in one table.

Maybe other tables if you need to store additional information about the groups (like Occupation ID, Name, Description, etc) that you don't want to duplicate in every person's row.

[crislewis]

130 records and you're worried about efficiency! Whilst this is very commendable it is hardly worth the effort. In this case KEEP IT SIMPLE. Store all the data in one table and use select queries to obtain the data in the way you need.

e.g. to get all people sorted into years:

SELECT name FROM table ORDER BY year, name;

to get them by occupation:

SELECT name FROM table ORDER BY occupation, name;