>From: "Arthur Fuller" <afuller@stripped>
>
>Unfortunately that oversimplifies the situation. A least a few movies have
>more than one director.
My motto: "Generalize for the norm; specialize for the exception."
The vast majority of movies have but one director. And I suspect that movies with multiple
directors have but one who is primary.
Keep a single director field, with a second NULL FULLTEXT field for additional directors.
The NULL test for the normal case is much cheaper than what you have to go through by
assuming that ALL movies have multiple directors!
This is how books are handled in large databases. Each has a primary author, and may
contain secondary authors. There is no assumption that large numbers of books have
multiple, equal authors.
This way, you can easily and conveniently list multiples as "Speilberg (et. al.)" without
doing joins. An interested browser can then go further to find out who the others are. In
the other case, each request for a director requires a JOIN.
Of course, your particular application may be director-centric, like if you're building a
special database to support research on directors. But if it's just a general-purpose
movies database, why bog the whole thing down just to suit a few exceptional cases?
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