Question

I’m thinking of doing something like…

Table Pants (20 entrees)  
| ID | Item | Description | Price   

Table Shirts (20 entrees)   
| ID | Item | Description | Price   

Table Socks (5 entrees)    
| ID | Item | Description | Price  

Then I run a php foreach ID in $table, to populate the list on a page.

So would this be an efficient way of doing this since some of my tables might not have many entrees? Or should I have all the entrees in one table and add an extra field for the different categories and find another way of populating my page via the new field? Or maybe a greater idea?

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

your model is not flexible and not efficient. Your second solution is the good one create a table named items and add an extra field named categories which should be a foreign key.
you can check this http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/74c91/1, here is all you need
here is the code needed for the database creation :

/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */;
/*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */;
/*!40014 SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 */;

-- Dumping structure for table database.categories
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `categories` (
  `id` int(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

-- Dumping data for table database.categories: ~0 rows (approximately)
/*!40000 ALTER TABLE `categories` DISABLE KEYS */;
INSERT INTO `categories` (`id`, `name`, `created`) VALUES
    (1, 'Pants ', '2012-12-15 11:37:27'),
    (2, 'Shirts ', '2012-12-15 11:37:36'),
    (3, 'Socks ', '2012-12-15 10:38:47');
/*!40000 ALTER TABLE `categories` ENABLE KEYS */;


-- Dumping structure for table database.clothes
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `clothes` (
  `id` int(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `item` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `description` text,
  `category_id` int(10) NOT NULL,
  `created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `category_id` (`category_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

-- Dumping data for table database.clothes: ~0 rows (approximately)
/*!40000 ALTER TABLE `clothes` DISABLE KEYS */;
INSERT INTO `clothes` (`id`, `item`, `description`, `category_id`, `created`) VALUES
    (1, 'red socks', 'Red Socks Rocks', 3, '2012-12-15 10:39:06'),
    (2, 'blue socks', 'nice socks too', 3, '2012-12-15 10:39:18'),
    (3, 'grey pants', 'pretty cool', 1, '2012-12-15 10:40:34'),
    (4, 'Blue Shirt', 'Nice blue shirt', 2, '2012-12-15 10:40:10');
/*!40000 ALTER TABLE `clothes` ENABLE KEYS */;
/*!40014 SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1 */;
/*!40101 SET CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */;

And here is the code to retrieve your data:

    SELECT 
clothes.id AS clotheId, 
clothes.item AS clotheItem, 
clothes.description AS clotheDescription, 
categories.id AS categoryId, 
categories.name AS categoryName 
FROM clothes 
LEFT JOIN categories 
ON clothes.category_id=categories.id;