Shawn Hartsock

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Database Design

By Shawn Hartsock (author)

Originally published .

Republished from Thoughts and Ideas. The original writing is preserved; topic and concept suggestions are generated metadata, not part of the original article.

Let’s say I want a screen that displays a list of MP3s with Genre, Artist, Album, Song Name, Play Length. What would the database table for this look like? Many neophytes would design a table that looked like:

MP3Files

Column

Typedefault

MP3ID

int

auto increment

Genre

varchar(255)NULL

Artist

varchar(255)NULL

Album

varchar(255)

NULL

Song Name

varchar(255)

NULL

Play Length

varchar(255)NULL

… and amazingly never see the problem with this.

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