Bio database

Anon

Hi all!

I have to make a database which will contain biographies. What "type" must my fields be? Here under are the data I need: please, tell me if the types I'm gonna use are correct...!

PersonID= smallint(5)
Overview= text
Male/Female= text
First name= varchar(50)
Surname= varchar(50)
DOB= date
DOD= date
Country= varchar (50)
Attributes= text
Achievements= text
Bio= text
Links= text
Quotes= text
Photo= text

Thanx!

Nico

Anon

Looks alright to me.. although you might want to change Photo to a BLOB if you're going to store the actual image in the database. Also you might want to make PersonID an autoincrementing int(11) as such:
(the following uses MySQL syntax/features)

CREATE TABLE bio (
PersonID INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
Overview TEXT,
Gender VARCHAR(5),
FirstName VARCHAR(50),
SurName VARCHAR(5),
DOB DATE,
DOD DATE,
Country VARCHAR(50),
Attributes TEXT,
Achievements TEXT,
Bio TEXT,
Links TEXT,
Quotes TEXT,
Photo BLO😎;

Anon

Also you might want to consider using more than one table for instance, instead of having one or more quotes stored in a TEXT field, why not have a 'quotes' table, with the PersonId as the foreign key into the 'bio' table.

This way you can hold many quotes against one person etc... its just better DB practise.

Apologies if i have completly misinterpreted the use of that field ;-)

Anon

It looks like you might be using text fields where you really don't need them. It probably wont make a big difference, but in general, unless you might need over 240 or so characters just make the field a varchar of the max length you need. For example... you have a gender field. You wouldn't really need more than 6 characters there, so make it a varchar(6). Actualy, I'd advise that you make it a char(1) field and then use your PHP to turn that one characters into Male or Female.
Also, there's no need to include a length with tinyint fields... or any numeric type field for that matter.
And you may want to look into making your date fields integer fields and then using unix timestamps instead. Check out this article for more details:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/akent20000610.php3

Anon

Hi Nico!!

Good effort froom ur side. What u can try is-auto generation of id. Besides that u can use long blob as datatype to store too long text because you dont know how much the person will keep the text size. Next think what u can do simply store the image path in the data base and store the images in different directory. I feel that will save the time.

Try out good luck

Hemanshu