Question

I have a employee table and status table. In employee table i have his id and name. and in status i store his status for various months of a year.

It never ends i.e. starting from current year to more year to come by it will keep on growing i.e. each row represents a status for a month and a year. So this takes hell lot of time to load a data for 12 month on screen as its 1 to many relationship.

So i was thinking to store this data in a serialized manner in same table as employee table i.e. key will be month_year and value will be its status. So if i do this will this table grow large to create space problems?.

And what data type should i use if i store serialize data and store in it. Because this application can be used for 3-4 years also. so it comes upto 48 months data in a array and same as serialized in table.

**** Update *****

If this month is November, I will shown on screen data from this year October to next year October. So this is the biggest problem.

**** Update2 ***

This is how i should show my data on the screen i.e. for each employee 12 months status. So i enter the problem of nested queries in my php code. Get a employee in loop enter the second table and take all his data and show.

Answer 1

Serialization is a bad choice.
You can consider normalization like this way :-

employee ( id, name ...);
employee_status (employee_id, year_month int(6), status boolean);

To get list of employ status from October to next October :-

select e.id, e.name, es.year_month, es.status
from employee as e
inner join employee_status as es
on e.id=es.employee_id
where es.year_month between "201110" and "201210";