dev|sushi

To break my hiatus here at dev|sushi I decided to publish something I made for myself while working on a project for my freelance business. The form I am creating requires a country selection box and then later to display country names within the application. Instead of doing a god awful static select box on the form and then storing the full country name in the database, I decided to use the MySQL table approach. Simple and effective and allows you to use a nice space saving char(2) over a varchar(150) in your other tables.

I’ve worked with databases on average about four days a week for the last two years. My experience with databases includes: taking over maintenance, creating from scratch, incrementally improving and even completely redesigning a few. The experience has given me a lot of practice when it comes to design choices but not enough to truly be called a “Database Manager”. It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to know exactly where to put an index to maximize performance or how best to structure your tables to minimize the need for join queries. I recently read some great articles about how best to implement “tags” structurally and I thought I would share them.