Re: Prescriptive design rules

Evan Keel wrote:

"Evan Keel" <evankeel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:EbnBi.1216$3Y1.852@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This is a post from comp.databases.mysql:

<<let's say I want to ask a survey question, with checkboxes:

What animals do you like?
[] giraffe
[] elephant
[] donkey
...

I'd possibly create a single column named "like" and store each
response as a comma delimited string:
giraffe,donkey
elephant,donkey
etc


But further, let's say I have a question with checkboxes and also
radio buttons:

Please select which animals you own, and tell us how much you like
each:

[] cat () low () medium () high
[] dog () low () medium () high
[] rat () low () medium () high
...

What's the best table design to store that? E.g., I could have a
column named "own" and another column named "rate". Or I could have a
column named "cat" which might contain:
yes,low

and another column named "dog" which might contain:
no

and another column named "rat" which might contain:
yes,high

etc. But neither of those seems quite right to me.

I'm obviously thinking of using one flat table for the whole survey,
is that a very wrong thing to do? I'm assuming that using a flat table
will naturally make it easier to export in spread*** format. I'm
also not concerned about the memory usage of a flat file.>>

If you could provide 10 prescriptive design rules to a front-end

developer,

what would they be? Or just 5?

Evan


You guys are so smug and clever. I was looking for real examples: When
nulls are ok. When 2 tables have the same key.

Never. And when they do.
.