On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 10:01:40AM -0800, Chris Lott wrote:
> I am building an app for an English Dept faculty member that is a kind of
> literary quote encyclopedia using PHP and MySQL. I am trying to lay the best
> design groundwork for growth. I plan to have a table of quotes and a table
> of topics, etc. My question is: what is the best way to relate each quote to
> its variable number of topics: simply a topic field with a list of ID's that
> relate to the topic table? Or should there be topic1, topic2, etc columns
> with the key? My worry with lists is that it will be hard later to deal
> with "weighting" the topics: ie sometimes one might want all quotes related
> to topic "A" but other times one might want only quotes where topic "A" is
> the primary topic (first in the list if using the list scheme).
a wais database will give you all that you ask and more. mysql
is not a text database tool, it has'nt the functionality to do
what you want to do, easily if at all. like all kludges it will
eventually break, very badly.
thier is another tool set built by the organisation that took
over wais development, (www.cnidr.org ???) these people made
some significant improvements and released a package called
Isite/Isearch - available for all real unicies and linux as well.
regards
jonathan
--
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Jonathan Michaels
PO Box 144, Rosebery, NSW 1445 Australia
===========================================================<jon@stripped>
