Re: [chiPHPug-discuss] Data Models

[junkmail <jun...@2z...>]

Thanks for all the great thoughts! If anyone has ANYTHING else on this 
subject, I would greatly appreciate the info.

Alec, that schema design is very interesting. I've seen similar 
write-only setups for extremely high performance systems. It sounds like 
the type and sub-type may be more specific to your application domain, 
but I see the utility of it. The main concept I see here is using a 
giant table with another table to describe the custom fields. You'll 
never have to modify the database schema directly, but you can change 
the meaning of the fields on the fly and there's very little overhead to 
have a bunch of extra columns, correct?

The entire reason for using a data model is to answer the question "What 
if I want to use something else for my data storage". My hope is that 
one day to move towards a system similar to what Alec explained because 
it handles many problems fairly elegantly such as auditing, performance 
and a flexible schema. For now I am stuck with relational databases and 
an existing schema of a proprietary system. I am creating a web 
interface that extends the functionality.

Lubinski, you're describing something extremely close to what I've 
currently put together. As for the second system, it sounds more like 
you're describing an EAV system - AKA tagging with arbitrary data types. 
That's a very effective approach, but I'm not sure how to handle any 
kind of fast searchability of a system like that. I've created programs 
that use that for just text field entries, but I haven't taken it any 
further because of the search issue.

Thanks for the suggestions on the ORM's Jason, I'll definitely be 
digging into them to see what's good and bad. I modeled a lot of my 
current interfaces from CakePHP, but they don't seem to be very 
progressive in the database area. Torpor seems like it will be able to 
fill in those gaps.