Some of thoughts about creating a small reviews database for my tutorials

[ade234uk]

It is something I have never thought about or had to do before
I would like to create a small system on my own website that will allow users to leave a small message for my Linux tutorials.

There are two ways I could do this, I could use a flat file database or a database. I would like to use a database, however how would I go about storing the messages.

For instance say I get 10 messages related to one tutorial. It would be no good storing these comments in one field becuase I dont know how big it will get. What is the best way of doing this. Is it best to create a new table for each tutorial and then a new field and fill this with information, each time someone posts a new message.

So in the end I might have a table that looks like this

tutorial_id
review1
review2
review3

This one has 3 reviews

tutorial_id
review1
review2
review3
review4
review5
review6

This one has 6 reviews

[Piranha]

To start I suggest that you search for "database normalisation", then you will see that it is a bad idea to have many columns for the same thing. I would recommend you to do one table like this:

CREATE TABLE review (
   id            INT        AUTO_INCREMENT        PRIMARY KEY,
   tutorial_id   INT        NOT NULL,
   review        TEXT       NOT NULL
   // All other information you might want, like what user have submitted the review
)

Then each time a user add a review you add it in a new row in the database.