[Cialug] SQL wizardry possible?

[Carl Olsen]

Why not create a function that separates the data into their own columns in
the database?  That way, you would only have to run it once.  You could
actually do most of it in PHP and SQL instead of a database function.

Carl

-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf
Of Matthew Nuzum
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 5:00 PM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] SQL wizardry possible?

On 10/30/07, David Champion <dchampion at visionary.com> wrote:
> You should shoot the person that designed that database. I worked on a
> system that stored data similar to that - they had data fields as long
> strings of pipe delimited data, apparently because an earlier version of
> dBase had a small field count limit, and they needed more data elements
> per row. It made things very painful to work with, until we did a
> re-write and separated the data out.

Denormalization is all the rage these days. That's all this is
(serialized php data).

Sane people, however, keep the normalized data around too. :-/

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode
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