Question

I need and advice about MySQL.

I have a user table that have id, nickname, numDVD, money and table DVD that have idDVD, idUser, LinkPath, counter.

Now I belive that I could have max. 20 user and each user has about 30 DVD.

So when I insert a DVD I should have idDVD(auto-Increment), idUser (same idUser of User table), LinkPath (generic String), and counter that it is a number from 1 to 30 (unique number) (depends from number or DVD) for each user.

The problem is handle the last column “counter”, because I would select for example 2 3 random DVD from 1 to 30 that have the same UserId.

So I was thinking if it’s the best solution in my case and hard to handle (for me I never used MySQL) OR it’s better create 20 tables (1 for each user) that contains the ID and DVDname etc.

Thanks

Answer 1

Don’t create 20 tables! That’d be way overkill, and what if you needed to add more users in the future ? It’d be practically impossible to maintain and update reliably.

A better way would be like:

Table users
-> idUser
-> other user specific data

Table dvd
-> idDvd
-> DVDname
-> LinkPath
-> other dvd specific data (no user data here)

Table usersDvds
-> idUser
-> idDvd

This way, it’s no problem if one or more users has the same DVD, as it’s just another entry in the usersDvds table – the idDvd value would be the same, but idUser woudl be different. And to count how many DVDs a user has, just do a SELECT count(*) FROM usersDvds WHERE userId = 1