DON’T DO IT There is simply far too much risk involved, and you will typically need to be externally audited to ensure that you’re complying with all the relevant local laws and security practises. There are many third-party companies that do it for you that have already gone through all trouble of making sure their … Read more
You’re attempting to do a design that is called Polymorphic Associations. That is, the foreign key may reference rows in any of several related tables. But a foreign key constraint must reference exactly one table. You can’t declare a foreign key that references different tables depending on the value in another column of your Comments … Read more
I do agree with posters below that Options 3, 4, or 5 are most likely to be appropriate. However, each of your suggested implementations has its benefits and costs. I’d suggest choosing one by matching it to your specific requirements. For example: Option 1 pros: Fast to implement. Allows DB actions on custom fields (searching, … Read more
Update: Thanks to @Cloudkiller, there’s another configuration setting that might need to be changed (as of 4.3.6) in addition to Update V4: $cfg[‘FirstLevelNavigationItems’] Update V4: According to Configuration Docs, you can modify: $cfg[‘MaxNavigationItems’] The number of items that can be displayed on each page of the navigation tree. Can also try: $cfg[‘MaxTableList’] The maximum number … Read more
If your columns in the PostgreSQL are with underscores, you can put aliases but with doule-quotes. Example : SELECT my_column as “myColumn” from table;
The design of the table depends on the entity it needs to store. If all the data belongs together, then 50 columns (or even 100) might be the correct thing to do. So long as the table is normalized, there is no rule of thumb regarding size, apart from database capabilities and the need to … Read more
Unlike actual programming language code, they: not portable (every db has its own version of PL/SQL. Sometimes different versions of the same database are incompatible – I’ve seen it!) not easily testable – you need a real (dev) database instance to test them and thus unit testing their code as part of a build is … Read more
There is no conclusion that composite primary keys are bad. The best practice is to have some column or columns that uniquely identify a row. But in some tables a single column is not enough by itself to uniquely identify a row. SQL (and the relational model) allows a composite primary key. It is a … Read more
Sack your contractor. Okay, seriously, this isn’t standard practice. This can be seen simply because all RDBMS that I have ever worked with implement NULL, logic for NULL, take account of NULL in foreign keys, have different behaviour for NULL in COUNT, etc, etc. I would actually contend that using ‘Z’ or any other place … Read more
Splendid question! Firstly, let’s make some assumptions about “better”. I’m assuming you don’t much care about disk space – a bitmask is efficient from a space point of view, but I’m not sure that matters much if you’re using SQL server. I’m assuming you do care about speed. A bitmask can be very fast when … Read more