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currently Im working on a project that, at first glance, will require many tables in a database. Most of the tables are fairly straightforward however I do have an issue. One of the tables will be a list of members for the website, things like username, password, contact info, bio, education, etc will be included. This is a simple design, however, there is also a need for each member to have their availability entered and store in the database as well. Availability is defined as a date and time range. Like available on 4/5/2011 from 1pm to 6pm EST, or NOT available every friday after 8pm EST. For a single user, this could be a table on its own, but for many users, Im not sure how to go about organizing the data in a manageable fashion. First thought would be to have code to create a table for each user, but that could mean alot of tables in the database in addition to the few I have for other site functions. Logically i could use the username appended to Avail_ or something for the table name ie: Avail_UserBob and then query that as needed. But im curious if anyone can think of a better option than having the potential of hundreds of tables in a single database.

edit So general agreement would be to have a table for members, unique key being ID for instance. Then have a second table for availability (date, start time, end time, boolean for available or not, and id of member this applies to). Django might sound nice and work well, but i dont have the time to spend learning another framework while working on this project. The 2 table method seems plausable but Im worried about the extra coding required for features that will utilize the availability times to A) build a calender like page to add, edit, or remove entered values, and B) match availabilities with entries from another table that lists games. While I might have more coding, I can live with that as long as the database is sound, functional, and not so messy. Thanks for the input guys.

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  • You should also make a new copy of the program for each user. Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 16:34

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Not to sound like a troll, but you should take a look into using a web framework to build most of this for you. I'd suggest taking a look at Django. With it you can define the type of fields you wish to store (and how they relate) and Django builds all the SQL statements to make it so. You get a nice admin interface for free so staff can login and add/edit/etc.

You also don't have to worry about building the login/auth/change password, etc. forms. all that session stuff is taken care of by Django. You get to focus on what makes your project/app unique.

And it allow you to build your project really, really fast.

djangoproject.org

I don't have any other framework suggestions that meet your needs. I do... but I think Django will fit the bill.

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Idunno! This is how i've been solving this problem, over and over again with each of my clients. I feel as if I should be a Django salesman or something. But really... its a great framework. I didn't know a lick of Python when I first started. So my templates contained a LOT of logic...as I got better at Python I pushed my logic further back into views, model methods, managers, etc. Now im str8 pimpin. This kid could be too.
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Create a table to store users. Use its primary key as foreign key in other tables.

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The databases are written to hold many many rows in a table. There are not optimized for table creation. So it is not a good idea to create a new table for each user. Instead give each user an unique identifier and put the availability in a separate table. Provide an additional flag to make an entry valid or invalid.

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Create a table of users; then create a table of availabilities per user. Don't try to cram availabilities into the user table: that will guarantee giant grief for you later on; and you'll find you have to create an availabilities table then.

Google database normalization to get an idea why.

Take it as truth from one who has suffered such self-inflicted grief :-)

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