Access Code Opinions

[jameseymour]

I am making a little database but thought I would get other input on it before I did.

Basically the database will house information on ebooks (title, edition, year, link and other stuff). We have remote partners that we give access to SOME of our eBooks. We also make their websites and we only want to display eBooks they actually have access too. So this database's final field will be an "access code". So the book will have an access code to list who has access to it.

The way I was going to do it is have the field have delimited data, such as:
accessCode="code01;code03;code12";

And then just build a function that verifies access rights. But then I thought that will slow everything down and be kind of sloppy.

I was wondering if there was a better way of doing this. Any opinions?

[bastien]

Delimited fields suck for both searching on (since it usually kills the index resulting in a slower search) and maintenance

I would use a sub (intermediary) table

record_id (pk)
ebook_id
user_id
status ???[may be useful in your app]

then you can use a subselect (if supported) to pull out the data easily...plus its easy to maintain