This is a religous war; and the way these are won is usually by killing everyone on the other side. Let's assume that is not an option.

If you have 270 products (rows?) and 10 categories, performance is not an issue, so a seperate table should be ok.

But with a seperate category table, you will have to build maintenance panels, etc. for each additional table. I've seen instances where the dba doesn't want to continually add lookup/validation tables. What we do is have one table with an additional column that is the field begin validated, and then we have one lookup table for any number of fields.

Another solution I have used is to have two entry fields: one text, one select. The select is populated with a "select distinct col from table", and the first option is "Existing values". The cgi code uses the value from the select if it has been changed, or from the text otherwise. At least this way the user can look at/choose existing values without worrying about typos.

In reply to Re: Database Design Issues - OT by voyager
in thread Database Design Issues - OT by Ovid

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