Question

I’m playing around with this idea where i was saving “logs” in a “LOGS” table, with each row containing the info like “id” “title” “logtext” “views” “upvotes” “downotes”…you get the basic idea. And this all works great for displaying the logs on the page and it’s all done within one table which is nice and clean.

But then I decided I wanted to try something like having comments on these logs. Is it typical along with the row made in the “LOGS” table also to just make a whole new table in the database with..lets say the id then that table can contain comment information? Such as name email text? I just think this will be kinda crazy to eventually have thousands of tables…when before they would really just be rows in one table.

And then the issue with my cron that I was going to use will delete legs after a month based on the timestamp in the row…but there is no timestamp on tables so its not like I could tell it what tables to delete.

I’m not familiar with “blobs” would it be typical to have a way to fit all the comments into a single cell or something?

Answer 1

I think what you are reaching for is something like this:

TABLE LOGS
| logid | title | views | ...

TABLE COMMENTS
| comid | logid | author | comment | ...

And then whenever you fetch a particular log for display, you also go ahead and fetch any comments on that log~ Similarly whenever you delete from LOGS just be sure to delete from COMMENTS at the same time~

If you REALLY want it all to be in ONE table, I recommend json_encoding a PHP array of comments into a TEXT type comments field.