Question

I am creating a small playlist program on VB, which contains adduser, deleteuser and also user can modify its playlist.

My stupid question is, how do I manage user playlist? Consider I am using database, where should I add user?

1. As a new table in Database?
2. As a new Entry in some kind of Table which contains userID, Name and its undefined number of choices?

If I select option 2, what kind of datatype handles a integer set of undefined size?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You would create 3 tables:

Users table
-----------
userID
email
password
name


Playlist table
--------------
playlistID
userID
trackID


Tracks table
------------
trackID
trackName

You would then create relationship between the tables:

Users.userID 1-* Playlist.userID (1 to many)

Tracks.trackID 1-* Playlist.trackID (1 to many)

Then you would store the users choices in the playlist table.

To see a users tracks you could do:

SELECT Playlist.trackID, Tracks.trackName
FROM Playlist
JOIN Tracks ON Playlist.trackID=Tracks.trackID
WHERE Playlist.userID = 12
ORDER BY Tracks.trackName

This is the basics of relational database system and normalisation of data.

For more information see:

http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/179103-relational-database-design-normalization/