I have many fields which are multi valued and not sure how to store them? if i do 3NF then there are many tables. For example: Nationality.
A person can have single or dual nationality. if dual this means it is a 1 to many. So i create a user table and a user_nationality table. (there is already a nationality lookup table). or i could put both nationalities into the same row like "American, German" then unserialize it on run-time. But then i dont know if i can search this? like if i search for only German people will it show up?
This is an example, i have over 30 fields which are multi-valued, so i assume i will not be creating 61 tables for this? 1 user table, 30 lookup tables to hold each multi-valued item's lookups and 30 tables to hold the user_ values for the multi valued items?
You must also keep in mind that some multi-valued fields group together like "colleges i have studied at" it has a group of fields such as college name, degree type, time line, etc. And a user can have 1 to many of these. So i assume i can create a separate table for this like user_education with these fields, but lets assume one of these fields is also fixed list multi-valued like college campuses i visited then we will end up in a never ending chain of FK tables which isn't a good design for social networks as the goal is it put as much data into as fewer tables as possible for performance.
If you need to keep using SQL, you will need to create these tables. you will need to decide on how far you are willing to go, and impose limitations on the system (such as only being able to specify one campus).
As far as nationality goes, if you will only require two nationalities (worst-case scenario), you could consider a second nationality field (Nationality and Nationality2) to account for this. Of course this only applies to fields with a small maximum number of different values.
If your user table has a lot of related attributes, then one possibility is to create one attributes table with rows like (user_id, attribute_name, attribute_value). You can store all your attributes to one table. You can use this table to fetch attributes for given users, also search by attribute names and values.
The simple solution is to stop using a SQL table. This what NoSQL is deigned for. Check out CouchDB or Mongo. There each value can be stored as a full structure - so this whole problem could be reduced to a single (not-really-)table.
The downside of pretty much any SQL based solution is that it will be slow. Either slow when fetching a single user - a massive JOIN statement won't execute quickly or slow when searching (if you decide to store these values as serialized).
You might also want to look at ORM which will map your objects to a database automatically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_object-relational_mapping_software#PHP
This is an example, i have over 30
fields which are multi-valued, so i
assume i will not be creating 61
tables for this?
You're right that 61 is the maximum number of tables, but in reality it'll likely be less, take your own example:
"colleges i have studied at"
"college campuses i visited"
In this case you'll probably only have one "collage" table, so there would be four tables in this layout, not five.
I'd say don't be afraid of using lots of tables if the data set you're modelling is large - just make sure you keep an up to date ERD so you don't get lost! Also, don't get caught up too much in the "link table" paradigm - "link tables" can be "entities" in their own rights, for example you could think of the "colleges i have studied at" link table as an "collage enrolments" table instead, give it it's own primary key, and store each of the times you pay your course fees as rows in a (linked) "collage enrolment payments" table.
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Many database rows vs one comma separated values row
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I'm interested how and why many to many relationship is better than storing the information in one row.
Example: I have two tables, Users and Movies (very big data). I need to establish a relationship "view".
I have two ideas:
Make another column in Users table called "views", where I will store the ids of the movies this user has viewed, in a string. for example: "2,5,7...". Then I will process this information in PHP.
Make new table users_movies (many to many), with columns user_id and movie_id. row with user_id=5 and movie_id=7 means that user 5 has viewed movie 7.
I'm interested which of this methods is better and WHY. Please consider that the data is quite big.
The second method is better in just about every way. Not only will you utilize your DBs indexes to find records faster, it will make modification far far easier.
Approach 1) could answer the question "Which movies has User X viewed" by just having an SQL like "...field_in_set(movie_id, user_movielist) ...". But the other way round ("Which user do have viewed movie x") won't work on an sql basis.
That's why I always would go for approach 2): clear normalized structure, both ways are simple joins.
It's just about the needs you have. If you need performance then you must accept redundancy of the information and add a column. If your main goal is to respect the Normalization paradigma then you should not have redundancy at all.
When I have to do this type of choice I try to estimate the space loss of redundancy vs the frequency of the query of interest and its performance.
A few more thoughts.
In your first situation if you look up a particular user you can easily get the list of ids for the films they have seen. But then would need a separate query to get the details such as the titles of those movies. This might be one query using IN with the list of ids, or one query per film id. This would be inefficient and clunky.
With MySQL there is a possible fudge to join in this situation using the FIND_IN_SET() function (although a down side of this is you are straying in to non standard SQL). You could join your table of films to the users using ON FIND_IN_SET(film.id, users.film_id) > 0 . However this is not going to use an index for the join, and involves a function (which while quick for what it does, will be slow when performed on thousands of rows).
If you wanted to find all the users who had view any film a particular user had viewed then it is a bit more difficult. You can't just use FIND_IN_SET as it requires a single string and a comma separated list. As a single query you would need to join the particular user to the film table to get a lot of intermediate rows, and then join that back against the users again (using FIND_IN_SET) to find the other users.
There are ways in SQL to split up a comma separated list of values, but they are messy and anyone who has to maintain such code will hate it!
These are all fudges. With the 2nd solution these easy to do, and any resulting joins can easily use indexes (and possibly the whole queries can just use indexes without touching the actual data).
A further issue with the first solution is data integretity. You will have to manually check that a film doesn't appear twice for a user (with the 2nd solution this can easily be enforced using a unique key). You also cannot just add a foreign key to ensure that any film id for a user does actually exist. Further you will have to manually ensure that nothing enters a character string in your delimited list of ids.
I want to love DynamoDB, but the major drawback is the query/scan on the whole DB to pull the results for one query. Would I be better sicking with MySQL or is there another solution I should be aware of?
Uses:
Newsfeed items (Pulls most recent items from table where id in x,x,x,x,x)
User profiles relationships (users follow and friend eachother)
User lists (users can have up to 1,000 items in one list)
I am happy to mix and match database solutions.The main use is lists.
There will be a few million lists eventually, ranging from 5 to 1000 items per list. The list table is formatted as follows: list_id(bigint)|order(int(1))|item_text(varchar(500))|item_text2(varchar(12))|timestamp(int(11))
The main queries on this DB would be on the 'list_relations' table:
Select 'item_text' from lists where list_id=539830
I suppose my main question. Can we get all items for a particular list_id, without a slow query/scan? and by 'slow' do people mean a second? or a few minutes?
Thank you
I'm not going to address whether or not it's a good choice or the right choice, but you can do what you're asking. I have a large dynamoDB instance with vehicle VINs as the Hash, something else for my range, and I have a secondary index on vin and a timestamp field, I am able to make fast queries over thousands of records for specific vehicles over timestamp searches, no problem.
Constructing your schema in DynamoDB requires different considerations than building in MySQL.
You want to avoid scans as much as possible, this means picking your hash key carefully.
Depending on your exact queries, you may also need to have multiple tables that have the same data..but with different hashkeys depending on your querying needs.
You also did not mention the LSI and GSI features of DynamoDB, these also help your query-ability, but have their own sets of drawbacks. It is difficult to advise further without knowing more details about your requirements.
I have been looking for some optimization tips since I´m doing a RPG modification which uses MySQL to store data by PHP.
I´m using one unique table to store all user information in columns by his unique ID, and I have to store (many?) data for each user. Weapons and other information.
I´m using explode and implode as a method to store the weapons, for example, in one column with the 'text' value. I don´t know if that´s a good practice and I don´t know if I will have performance problems if I get thousands of players doing tons of UPDATES , SELECT , etc, requests.
I read that a Junction table may be better to store the weapons and all those information, but I don´t know if that will get better information that you request it by the explode method.
I mean, I should store all the weapons in a different table, each weapon with his information (each weapon have some information, like different columns, I use multiple explode for that inside the main explode) and the user owner of that weapon to identify the weapon than just have them in one column.
It can be 100 items at least to store, I don´t know if it´s good to make 100 records per user on a different table and call all of them all the time better than just call the column and use explode.
Also I want to improve my skills and knowledge to make the best performance MySQL database I can.
I hope somebody can tell me something.
Thanks, and sorry for my stupid english grammar.
It is almost always best practice to normalize your table data. There are some exceptions to this rule (especially in very high volume databases), but you probably do not need to worry about those exceptions until you get to the point of first understanding how to properly normalize and index your tables.
Typically, try to arrange your tables in a way that mimics real-world objects and their relations to each other.
So, in your case you have users - that is one table. Each user might have multiple weapons. So, you now have a weapons table. Since multiple different users might have the same weapon and each user might have multiple weapons, you have a many-to-many relationship between them, so you should have a table "users_weapons" or similar that does nothing but relate user id's to weapon id's.
Now say the users can all have armor. So now you add an armor table and a users_armor table (as this is likely many-to-many as well).
Just think through the different aspects of your game and try to understand the relationships between them. Make sure you can model these relationships in database tables before you even bother writing any code to actually implement the functionality.
Yes it is better to use several tables instead of one. It's better to db performance, easier to understand, easier to maintain and simplier to use as well.
Let's suggest that one user has several weapons with multiple features(but not unique among all weapons). And in one place in your game you just need to know the value of one specific feature:
doing it by your way you'll need to find user row in users table, fetch on column, explode it several times, and there you have your value, but it complicates even more if you want to change it and save then.
better way is having one table for user details(login, password, email etc), another table which keeps user weapons(name of weapon, image maybe) and table in which will be all features, special powers of weapons kept. You could keep all possible features of all weapons in extra table as well. This way you if you already know user id from user table, you'll have to only join 2 tables in your sql query, and there you got value of feature of specific weapon of user.
Example pseudo schema of tables:
users
user_id
user_name
password
email
weapons
weapon_id
user_id
weapon_name
image
weapons_features
feature_id
weapon_id
feature_name
feature_value
And if you really want to use some ordered data in text field in database encode it to JSON or serialize it. This way you don't have to explode and implode it!
As all guys said, typically you should start from normalized database structure.
If performance is ok, then great, nothing to do.
If not, you can try many different things:
Find and optimize query which works slow.
Denormalize queries - sometimes joins kill performance.
Change data access pattern used in application.
Store data in file system or use NoSQL/polyglot persistence solution.
I'm writing a lesson observation system for the school I work at.
The database structure looks like this:
I'm currently developing the input form for the Observations table and quite a few of its fields require tick-boxes. For example, the Focus field can be any number of twelve options; the Positive and Negative field can each be any number of nearly twenty options.
In the image above, I've used VARCHAR to allow for a serialize'd array.
However, I'm starting to wonder if this is the best route to go down, especially considering I may want to do some semi-complex analysis of the data such as top 5 staff for a specific positive attribute such as behaviour (which would involve counting the number of behaviour attributes each member of staff had under the Positive field in the Observations table).
Two questions here;
Should I be using extra tables? For Focus I would imagine the first table to have three fields - ID (key and auto-increment), Observation_ID and Focus_ID. The Focus_ID would correlate with another table called focii or something which would simply have two fields - Focus_ID and Title. I would need two tables for Focus and three tables for Positive/Development (same options but different logging).
If I use these extra database tables, what would my SQL statement look like when trying to retrieve the information from the Observations table including all associated focuses, positives and developments?
Thanks in advance,
Yes, you should always normalise in this kind of situations. Storing serialised data is hellish if you wanna do calculations or even modifications. (How are you gonna remove the 3rd element?)
Example of a query:
SELECT
o.id,
COUNT(f.id) AS number_of_focusses
FROM
observations o
INNER JOIN focuses f
ON f.observation_id = o.id
GROUP BY id
This would give you the number of 'focus records' belonging to each observation.
Which is good practice? To store data as a comma separated list in the database or have multiple rows?
I have a table for accounts, classes, and enrolments.
If the enrolment table has 3 fields: ID, AccountID and ClassID, is it better for ClassID to be a varchar containing a comma separated list such as this: "24,21,182,12" or for it to be just an int and have one entry per enrolment?
tldr: Don't do this. That is, don't use a "packed array" here.
Use a correctly normalized design with "multiple rows". This is likely a good candidate for a Many-to-Many relationship. Consider this structure:
Classes 1:M Enrollments(Class,Student) M:1 Students
Following a properly normalized design will reduce pain. In addition, here are some other advantages:
Referential integrity (use InnoDB)
Consistent model described with relationships
Type enforcement (can't have "foo,,")
JOIN and query without needing custom code
"What are the names of the students in class A?"
"Who is taking more than one class?"
Columns can be useful indexed (query performance)
Generally faster than handling locally in code
More flexible and consistent
Can attach attributes to enrollments such as status
No need to have code to handle serialization at access sites
More accommodating of placeholders and ORMs
Never ever ever cram multiple values into a single database field by combining them with some sort of delimiter, like a comma, or fixed length substrings. In the rare cases where this clearly gives a benefit in storage requirements or performance ... see rule #1: never ever ever. Ever.
When you cram multiple values into a single field, you sabatague all the clever features built into the database engine to help you retrieve and manipulate values.
Like let's say you have this -- I guess it's some sort of student database.
Plan A
student (student_id, account_id, class_id_mash)
Plan B
student (student_id, account_id)
student_class (student_id, class_id)
Okay, lets' say you want a list of all the students taking class #27. With Plan B you write
select student_id
from student join student_class on student.student_id=student_class.student_id
where class_id=27
Easy.
How would you do it with Plan A? You might think
select student_id
from student
where class_id_mash like '%27%'
But that will not only find all students in class 27, but also all those in class 127 or 272.
Okay, how about:
select student_id
from student
where class_id_mash like '%,27,%'
There, now we won't find 127 or 272! But, oops, we also won't find it if the 27 happens to be the first or last one in the list, because then there aren't commas on both sides.
So okay, maybe we could get around that with more rules about delimiters or with a more complex matching expression. But it would be unnecessariliy complex and painful.
And even if we did it, every search for class id has to be a full-fill sequential search. With one value per field and multiple records, you can create an index on the class_id field for fast, efficient retrieval. (Some database engines have ways to index into the middle of text fields, but again, why get into complicated solutions when there's an easy solution?)
How do we validate the class_id's? With separate fields, we can say "class_id references class" and the database engine will insure that we don't enter an illegal value. With the mash, no such free validation.
I have done both, but instead of storing the information in the database as comma seperated, I use another delimiter, such as | (so that I don't worry about formatting on insert into db). Its more about how often you will query the data
If you are only going to need the complete list, it is fine to store it as a comma separated value. But if you need to query the list, they should be stored separately.