How about adding another column, called ordering or something?

QUESTIONS
-----------------
QUESTION_ID (pk)
QUESTION_NUM (int)
QUESTION (varchar)
SHOW_THE_QUESTION (bit)
QUESTION_ORDER (int)

[download]

Getting the questions in the correct order then simply means using ORDER BY QUESTION_ORDER.

If you initially increment QUESTION_ORDER by ten or fifty or whatever, you can insert other questions in between the existing ones. This allows you to keep the integrity of "if you answered $something on $question_id .." references, while giving you (a bit) more flexibility in the ordering.

This is of course not a complete solution to the problem, since some devil's advocate will surely reply to this node saying "What if you want to insert $inc + 1 questions between question 1 and 2?" (Where $inc is the difference between the two question's QUESTION_ORDER). In this case you will be forced to reorder your QUESTION_ORDER columns, but you will still have the integrity between questions.

A little bit of decoupling goes a long way, though.

pernod
--
Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.

In reply to Re: reordering a stack with little effort by pernod
in thread reordering a stack with little effort by punkish

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.