The traditional way of doing such things is to make a table that contains all the domains, another with all the ip addresses, and tables like vhost refer to the tables with the domains and ip addresses using foreign keys. That way, all your domains have the same type, and so have your ip addresses. Furthermore, it enables you to do queries targetted at domains or ip addresses, so it's easy to find a maximum length.

You are trying to apply structured programming techniques on relational databases. That's not going to work - you need to apply relational techniques. Apply the right tools in each domain.

Abigail

In reply to Re: OT: defining DB fields - working towards consistancy... by Abigail-II
in thread OT: defining DB fields - working towards consistancy... by cLive ;-)

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.