NYCPHP Meetup

[Ben Sgro (ProjectSkyLine)]

Hello,

Hey, thanks alot.

I'm going to print this out and give it a thorough read.

I'm sure your correct, as I have minimal experiance in this. I take a look
at the POC as well.

Thanks!

- Ben

Ben Sgro, Chief Engineer
ProjectSkyLine - Defining New Horizons

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Cech" <dcech at phpwerx.net>
To: "NYPHP Talk" <talk at lists.nyphp.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:53 AM
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] XML Manipulation


> Ben Sgro (ProjectSkyLine) wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> After the XML vs SQL conversation, I started to rethink a product I'm 
>> working on.
>> I had been having a lot of trouble modeling the data into SQL. It was 
>> starting to
>> look very complicated.
>>
>> So, I decided I would try to store it in XML. The data I am storing is 
>> messages w/in a thread,
>> timestamp, body and subject. On the SQL side, we create a table that has 
>> the user id,
>> and a row per message/thread which contains a path to the xml file.
>>
>> The reason XML seemed better is that I store the data top down and that 
>> is the true
>> order of the thread. Messages within the thread can come from email or 
>> html page response,
>> so its important to insert items into the thread via the timestamp. Using 
>> XML just made it
>> simpler for me to wrap my head around, than trying to model it in SQL.
>
> This sounds awfully messy to me, and will most likely be very slow.
>
> I'm all for XML, but this kind of thing is what databases are meant for.
>
> All you need are 2 tables, one for each thread and one for messages.
>
> threads:
>
> thread_id,subject,ts,activity
>
> messages:
>
> msg_id,thread_id,user_id,ts,subject,body
>
> SQL:
>
> SELECT * FROM threads ORDER BY activity DESC
>
> SELECT * FROM messages WHERE thread_id=? ORDER BY ts ASC
>
> Couldn't be easier, if you want to store extra data about each thread or
> message just add fields to the relevant table.
>
> I just wrapped up a complete rewrite of a system that used one table for
> threads and messages, and I would strongly suggest advise against it.
>
> If you're looking for ideas, here is a proof-of-concept I put together
> back in 2004 for a system using a modified preorder traversal tree for
> threaded messages.
>
> http://clew.phpwerx.net/
>
> Dan
>
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