Question

I would like to let user see the date about the course. For example, a computer course will held on

1/9, 2/9, 3/9.

So, how to store these day in the database?
one column the store a string like this:

1/9/2011,2/9/2011,3/9/2011

or a separate table like this:

event_id   date
1          1/9/2011
1          2/9/2011
1          3/9/2011

Thank you.

Answer 1

both methods has it own benefits

first method will suit for simple data structure,
that’s mean your data size could be small,
your project job scope is small,
and you don’t wish to spent too many effort on that

the bad is hard to maintain in long run

second method will better for normalization
but require more code / JOIN to get the same piece of information
(you can do in one step in the first method)

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Is BAD for date string in d/m/Y,
let the presentation language to determine the locale

ISO format YYYY-MM-DD will be the better choice