Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript, 6th Edition

Chapter 9. Mastering MySQL

Chapter 8 provided you with a good grounding in the practice of using relational databases with the Structured Query Language. You’ve learned about creating databases and the tables they comprise, as well as inserting, looking up, changing, and deleting data.

With that knowledge under your belt, we now need to look at how to design databases for maximum speed and efficiency. For example, how do you decide what data to place in which table? Well, over the years, a number of guidelines have been developed that—if you follow them—ensure that your databases will be efficient and capable of growing as you feed them more and more data.

Database Design

It’s very important that you design a database correctly before you start to create it; otherwise, you are almost certainly going to have to go back and change it by splitting up some tables, merging others, and moving various columns about in order to achieve sensible relationships that MySQL can easily use.

Sitting down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and writing down a selection of the queries that you think you and your users are likely to ask is an excellent starting point. In the case of an online bookstore’s database, some of your questions could be:

• How many authors, books, and customers are in the database?

• Which author wrote a certain book?

• Which books were written by a certain author?

• What is the most expensive book?

• What is the best-selling book?

• Which books have not sold this year? ...