E-commerce problem

Anon

I have a little problem in developing my e-commerce solution. I want it to be flexible enough to be usable with more than one online shop, so I figured that I would put all of the categories into a table. My problem is that I want to be able to select multiple categories for one item and then search for other items in that category. Right now I am putting all of the categories into an array, but the select statements have to select a certain index in the array. Am I just going about this the wrong way, or is there some way to get the select statement to look through all of the elements in the array, even though they are varaible in number.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Steven Behnke

Anon

Steven -

It sounds like you're listing multiple categories within a single column of each row, i.e. CATEGORIES='this,that,theother,etc' It might work better to have a separate table to associate items with categories (by id), and leave the 'CATEGORIES' column out of the items table.

i.e.

Anon

I actually got that suggestion from someone else, and it made loads of sense. I just was unable to think of it by myself. Does splitting up large tables into several smaller tables speed up queries?

Anon

I'm not sure if splitting the tables will significantly speed up your queries, but a better db design will definitely make programming/maintenance easier.

Not being much of a db admin myself, I found the following web page very enlightening:
http://arapaho.nsuok.edu/~durler/aisfls/normal.htm

Anon

Hi Mate,

Check out the list attribute type with mysql. That is ideal for what you are trying to (if I have understood you correctly).

Mysql has inbuilt functions for searching the lists which greatly simplifies things.

Cheers

Shaitan