From: Martin Edelius
Date: March 19 1999 9:58am
Subject: MySQL/PHP3 for newbies. Suggestions?
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/571
Message-Id: <002401be71ef$278c9680$645ca8c0@asylum.spirex.se>

Hi.

I've been asked by a couple of people to help them get started with
MySQL and PHP3 as a webserver backend. I've been thinking about this and
came to the conclusion that I'd might as well write a small
introduction/beginners guide to MySQL/PHP3 while I'm at it.

Since I'm no expert in the area I'd like some feedback from you boys and
girls out there who also has experience with this. I'm not interested in
MySQL/PHP3 installation problems or how to tweak performance by fooling
around with key buffers and such, what I'm interested in is design
issues. What to think of when designing the database, what to be wary of
when using PHP3's MySQL functions, what mistakes you have done that
you'd like to tell others about and so on.

For instance, is it a better approach to have several small tables or
one big when doing queries? If I have several small tables I can
pinpoint the data I need. If I have one big table there's a lot of stuff
I'd have to skip (i.e. not select), but then again it might be faster to
open just one table thnan skipping through several small. And how big
overhead is it if I choose too 'big' variables? HDD size is one thing
but how much slower will MySQL be if I use an INT where I could have
used a TINYINT? Stuff like that.

This article will be targeted at smaller projects and at complete
beginners when it comes to database design. I assume that they'll have a
good understanding of HTML and has basic programming knowledge (i.e.
they should know what a for loop is and such).

Since this might be a bit off topic for this list, please send your
suggestions, ideas and comments directly to me at
martin.edelius@stripped. Credits will of course be given to all who
participates.


Thanks.


Best regards,
Martin Edelius
Spirex Digital Design

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www: http://www.spirex.se
Mail: martin.edelius@stripped
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Fax: +46-31-514331
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