Have a task to make votes for photo. Because users can vote only one time for photo, I should save them. I plan do not to make separate table for saving user ids, but save them in photo table in blob field separating by any delimiter.
What do you think about such practice? Are there any hidden troubles?
I see with such structure, I will reduce count of queries and joins.
Have a task to make votes for photo. Because users can vote only one
Share
I think the issue you may run into is one of scalability. If this photo voting site becomes quite popular, these blobs will get quite big, and will place more significant load on your server-side processing language (php, asp, etc..).
My general rule of thumb- databases are designed by programmers, much better than I, at doing one thing and doing one thing well- handling data. Your processing of the data most likely will not be as efficient as what the database can do. In otherwords- use a join, instead of post-processing it yourself.