I'm currently rewriting an interview scheduleing CGI as part of my company's placement service. The orginal scripts kept information in a flattext database, which I'm now moving into MySQL. Interviews are scheduled during my company's annual meetings, so there are a limited number of time periods when interviews actually take place.

Each (potential) employee and employeer submit the times they are available for an interview. In the orginal scripts, these were stored like this:

Tuesday, 8:00 am
Tuesday, 8:30 am
Tuesday, 9:00 am
. . . 
Tuesday, 4:30 pm

[download]

For each time period, a '1' is stored if the employee/employeer is available at that time, or '0' if they aren't. Our own staff then matches up a time when a prospective employee or employeer can do an interview, at which point that time period is marked with who they are interviewing with. To me, this seems like a lot of wasted space.

Is there another way of structuring the database? Any replacment structure should have the same time scale (every half hour, from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, Tuesday and Wednsday) and be able to mark times as "available", "unavailable", or "scheduled". If "scheduled", it needs to point to who they are scheduled with.

In reply to Interview scheduleing in a database by hardburn

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