From: Martijn Tonies Date: April 17 2007 1:53pm Subject: Re: Max columns in a tabel in MyISAM storage engine List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/206213 Message-Id: <010d01c780f7$c5d904c0$9902a8c0@martijnws> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > The "right" way to do this would be your second way, where there would be > one row per answer. I can't really grasp how the questions and answers > relate to anything else, so I'm making a lot of assumptions. > > If you are concerned that this technique is too slow, because it involves > linking two tables, there is an ugly alternative. You could store all of > your answers in a single text field, with some kind of delimited format: > > "q1=answer1,q2=answer2,q5=answer5" > > And then parse it in your program. And eliminates the possibility to do any queries against your database that make any sense whatsoever. Martijn Tonies Database Workbench - development tool for MySQL, and more! Upscene Productions http://www.upscene.com My thoughts: http://blog.upscene.com/martijn/ Database development questions? Check the forum! http://www.databasedevelopmentforum.com