Re: Prescriptive design rules

Evan Keel wrote:

> This is a post from comp.databases.mysql:
>
> <<let's say I want to ask a survey question, with checkboxes:
>
> What animals do you like?
> [] giraffe
> [] elephant
> [] donkey
> ...
>
> I'd possibly create a single column named "like" and store each
> response as a comma delimited string:
> giraffe,donkey
> elephant,donkey
> etc
>
>
> But further, let's say I have a question with checkboxes and also
> radio buttons:
>
> Please select which animals you own, and tell us how much you like
> each:
>
> [] cat () low () medium () high
> [] dog () low () medium () high
> [] rat () low () medium () high
> ...
>
> What's the best table design to store that? E.g., I could have a
> column named "own" and another column named "rate". Or I could have a
> column named "cat" which might contain:
> yes,low
>
> and another column named "dog" which might contain:
> no
>
> and another column named "rat" which might contain:
> yes,high
>
> etc. But neither of those seems quite right to me.
>
> I'm obviously thinking of using one flat table for the whole survey,
> is that a very wrong thing to do? I'm assuming that using a flat table
> will naturally make it easier to export in spreadsheet format. I'm
> also not concerned about the memory usage of a flat file.>>
>
> If you could provide 10 prescriptive design rules to a front-end developer,
> what would they be? Or just 5?

1. Learn the fundamentals
2. See 1
3. See 1
4. See 1
5. See 1