Question

I need to store multiple id’s in either a field in the table or add another table to store the id’s in.

Each member will basically have favourite articles. Each article has an id which is stored when the user clicks on a Add to favourites button.

My question is:

Do I create a field and in this field add the multiple id’s or do I create a table to add those id’s?

What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

You create a separate table, this is how things work in a relational database. The other solution (comma separated list of ids in one column) will lead to an unmaintainable database. For example, what if you want to know how many times an article was favorited? You cannot write queries on a column like this.

Your table will need to store the user’s id and the article’s id – these refer to the primary keys of the corresponding tables. For querying, you can either use JOINs or nested SELECT queries.