Database Design Question

enkidu007

I'm design a project for class. If I have a large number of stories to catalog which is the best way to store it with mysql.

Do I put the entire story into one of the fields into the database or
Do I have the database just contain the link to the actual story (stored somewhere on the server?

Thanks for your advise
John

sfullman

Store the article in a TEXT field because you can do database searches.

All major information websites do it this way.

Also you never worry about divergence because the database IS the article.

Make a page that will display an article based on the article's primary key (which should be an integer value not having any significance for any other reason).

Sam

enkidu007

Thanks that was very helpful. The only other question is do that method even though the text is over 100k? and with lots of articles? In time the database will be over 50mb, is this ok?

Thanks
John

sfullman

The size is no problem. You should categorize the articles and try to favor searches that rely oncategory and keywords vs. the atrticle content itself to speed things up.

another thing you might consider is using the database to statically gererate html pages which rely on no database or scripting. Whenever new articles are created, new pages are spit out or updated. This way you rarely use the database, yet depend on it as the source of the articles.

Just some things to think about but size is no issue a 100mb or even more.

remember to ahvbe a keywords field :-)

Sam

laserlight

Well, you should note:
"You can have indexes on BLOB and TEXT columns with MySQL Version 3.23.2 and newer. Older versions of MySQL did not support this."
That could have an impact on searching without using an additional keywords column.

bad76

Hi
may be easiest work with file upload, adding a field as description and limit the search at this field and the titles.

The mysql may work better (i've experimented a slowdown already with 50/60 blob inserted of 50k each...).