Question

I’m modelling MySQL database for an website.

I’m now making ‘people’ table, and deciding what columns needed.

a person has a name column,
and I want to add alias column, which contains the names in various conventions.

for example, a person whose name is ‘Micheal Jackson’ may have aliases like ‘M. Jackson‘,
‘Jackson, M’, or ‘M.J.’.

Anyway, each person can have different number of aliases, then What data type could be rational?

Make alias field as a Varchar, and put every aliases in it, and split them in PHP?

or make aliases dynamically from name in PHP? instead of putting it in DB?

I’m waiting for good recommendations, Thanks!

Answer 1

Make a new table and call it aliases. This table should have a Many-To-One relation with your table people.

The table aliases should have a foreign key to the parent table persons (i.e. have a column aliases.personId which references people.personId)

Then to retrieve the data use Joins.

references:

Cardinality (data modeling)

Foreign key

Join (SQL)

and lastly and most importantly Normalization