Well, I've been assigned to finish up the tail end of a jewelry ecommerce project which includes the database for the site.
I'm not a database designer... I can create the interfaces for the database but I have problems organizing the information.
So far this thing is just one table, and its pretty simple (thank god!)
stkno (item number) - primary key
ncatg (navigational category)
catg (keywords)
qty (quantity)
rprice (retail price)
price (actual price)
expires (expiration for display)
name (product name)
description (text field product description)
ship (contains shopping cart code for that item)
custom (indicates if piece is customizable)
Each item will have one specific ncatg which indicates its unique placement when a person is browing the jewelry by navigation. The catg keywords I thought I would have a comma delimited list for when a person was browing by generic categories or using the search function - is it bad to have an array of items in a field for that purpose, or should I implement another table?
Also, this table will likely always be under 1000 items - do I need to bother indexing it? If so, do I index just my category fields or should I try indexing the description for search purposes?
