Right now I’m creating a web-app which requires that multiple sets of data (including a URL, title, and date) be stored in a DB.
So for example, User1 may be storing Item 1 which consists of Example, http://example.com, and YY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. And he may have multiple items with the same types of data.
Before, I was sotring all the items in one field of my users table with something like:
Example=>http://example.com=>YY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS[END]
Example2=>http://example2.com=>YY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS[END]
etc...
That would be combined to one big string, and then in PHP I’d separate each string by the separator [END] and then separate each of THOSE strings by the separator =>. Now I’m wondering if it would be better to store these items in their own table, so each user would have an ‘Items’ table (user1_items, user2_items, etc.). Is there a ‘right’ way to do this? Would using separate tables be overkill? Also, about how much more space, if any, would I be losing on my web-host? Just looking for some guidance on how to procede with this.
If any further elaboration is needed, please let me know!
Have a user table with information about each user along with a unique user id.
Have a data table where each piece of information (url, title, date) is a separate column. Add an additional column called user_id that indicates which user this piece of information belongs to.