In-Column Data Encoding
The situation I am about to describe happened while I was working on a search engine for bibliographic data but I am transposing it for the car dealer's system.
When we have to migrate data from a pre-existing system into our newly-born data structure, we might encounter data that was formatted in a special way. For example, a list of possible colors for a car model could be expressed as a series of color codes, separated by semi-colons:
1A6;1A7;2B7;2T1A65
Users of the pre-existing system are comfortable with this method of entering data in this format, and in the case I experienced, users refused to let go of this way of entering data—and they had direct access to the MySQL tables. From a developer's perspective, however, ...
Get Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
