Create my own Auction site bored need a challenge

Adrian28uk

I am going to create my own auction site as a challenge. Its something I have wanted to do after learning how to create a small shopping cart.

I intend to keep the database as small as possible, so I was thinking that storing the auction description in text files could be the way to go.

Everything else would need to go in the database ie start time, end time, bids etc....

Do you think this is a good idea to store just Auction descriptions in text files.

Is it not better to keep as much info out of the database as possible?

When an auction id is called from the database it displays the info from the database but also opens the corresponding text file on the server the contains the description.

SpinCode

Hi,
The purpose why advance systems and database was created is to save years of repeated work. If you're curious and want to try a file system out, then read up on hashing, indexes, inverted indexes, the real computer science stuff.

For your project, you might want to try this:

http://www.addedworth.com/php/index.php?t=BERKELEY_DB

It's a good a challenge as any, and it'll add your skills to your resume too.

etully

I agree with SpinCode. A single table is probably the right way to store the descriptions unless you plan to have hundreds of millions of auctions in which case it's time to investigate alternate data storage solutions.

Or maybe a compromise: You might decide to have two tables for the auction data related by a common ID number. Table one stores price, start time, end time, etc. Table two stores the descriptions. I think that might be faster but benchmarking is the only way to know for sure. Populate a two table solution with 100,000 fake auctions and perform a few selects. Then do it with a one table solution and see how it compares.

The computer science people have all this worked out already and could tell you how best to optimize... but for your project, I think one table is the right way to go.

leatherback

As the other replies: Databases were created to help you do some stuff. Creating a good auction site will challenge you pretty seriously.

I disagree with the 'just one table' approach. the way I see it..

Table users
Table items
Table bids

If you want a challenge: Make it multi-language, add auto-bidding & auto-alerting, user-defined layout to it. Obviously you want to build it using the object-oriented approach using classes. That should keep you busy for a serious number of days.