Question

To follow on from my question yesterday….

MySQL Table Design for a Questionnaire

I sat down with my boss yesterday afternoon to run through how I was proposing to design the database. However, now I am more confused than ever.

He has been using Access for many years, and has questioned whether I will be able to produce reports from only using one column for the answer (ENUM). He feels from his experience with Access that each possible response (i.e. Very Satisfied, Fairly Satified, Fairly Unsatisfied, Very Unsatisfied), should have it’s own column and numerical value(i.e. 100, 66.6, 33.3, 0).

This is so that the database can produce reports that show the average satisfaction nationally and for each retailer individually.

I would really appreciate some guidence, as I really don’t want to get this wrong?

Thank you

Answer 1

In this case I wouldn’t go for an enum, I’d go for a ‘score’ column. So the columns might be:

userid, questionid, score 1,1,4 1,2,4 1,3,3 2,1,1 2,2,4 ... 

1 being very unsatisfied and 4 being very satisfied.

Then a query like:

select 25*avg(score) from Blah 

will give you your overall percentage.

select 25*avg(score), questionid from Blah group by questionid 

will give you a % per question.

Access isn’t really a database, so don’t listen to your boss 😉