Question

Here’s a layout of my data:

Heading 1:
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading

Heading 2:
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading

Heading 3:
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading

Heading 4:
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading

Heading 5:
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading
   Sub heading

These headings need to have a ‘Completion Status’ boolean value which gets linked to a user Id.

Currently, this is how my table looks:

id  |  userID  |  field_1  |  field_2  |  field_3  |  field_4  | etc...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1   |     1    |    0      |     0     |     1     |     0     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
2   |     2    |    1      |     0     |     1     |     1     |

Each field represents one Sub Heading. Having this many columns in my table looks awfully inefficient…

How can I go about optimizing this? I can’t think of any way to neaten it up :/

Answer 1

Don’t use boolean values but simple relations:

table completion_status

id user_id field_id

1  1       3
2  2       1
3  2       3
4  2       4
...

From that it’s easy to see that user 1 has completed field 3, and user 2 fields 1, 3 and 4.

This way you don’t have to change your database schema whenever you want to change the amount of fields.