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I have a system where people would upload something, then a single link would identify the uploaded file and display for other users. Each file would have its own page and they will have a comment box. Now I have the general idea of how to create the PHP script and the SQL I just have one problem. What would be beter? storing up all of the comments for each file in a single row, and adding a delimiter for each new comment? Or creating a new row for each comment input but having the same reference to the file? I would prefer if each comment had its own row in the SQL but then it can easily grow up to thousands of entries per day and im not sure if that's efficient.

Which approach from the two is the most efficient?

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Adding a new row for each comment would make more sense. You could have a column in the comment table which would be FileID and easily filter the results by that. While you will have people commenting on it and that will add rows, it will be much more efficient than having a single row. Especially considering that you will likely not have enough space for thousands of comments in a single row!

If you're really concerned about having too many comments, you should look into a NoSql solution like MongoDB or Cassandra. These systems are made specifically for handling large amounts of inserts (ie: new comments).

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If (each) comment length is limited then go for seprate rows with VARCHAR type. If you choose single row for all comments pertaining to each file then you cannot, before hand, estimate the length comments and you will have to declare it TEXT type, which means the data will be stored in separate file and this will impact the retrieval time negatively. Moreover, advanced querying and data-mining will be easier with separate rows.

Also separate rows will be consistent with some requirements of higher order normalisation.

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Make sure a comment has a set maxlength and from the database have the row with VARCHAR type. It is not recommended saving data in one field using delemeters and it would be a real hassle if you want to save information about the comments on a later stage (date / posted by / etc) or even when querying back for the information.

Save them as separate entries on a separate table with a reference to the uploadId.

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