Wedge

Quote

- I can either add an id_topic to the poll table, or allow for comma-separated poll IDs in the topic table (or both!) What do you like best? The table solution simply requires adding an extra key (on id_topic), seems simple enough. The poll ID list should be okay too, in the sense that when in Display, we can easily query for the poll details by using id_poll IN ({string:poll_ids}).

Add an id_topic to the poll table (with key as suggested) and repurpose the existing id_poll field as a tinyint to say whether or not there is a poll attached to the current topic. It's the fastest way of dealing with this.

I've never verified this, but my reading of the rather-vague documentation in MySQL suggests that when using UTF-8 that's actually storing UTF-8 characters, you store them based on the actual number of characters, not the number of bytes. (Certainly it makes reference to CHAR(10) fields in UTF-8 tables taking 30 bytes, as it has to account for 3 bytes per character) This suggests we'd still end up with 255 characters' worth of question even when using multibyte characters, but this needs verification to be sure.

There's a world of difference between 'could really benefit' and 'might be useful', and actually the only ones that stand out in my head as being useful are things like the topic subject. I'm not sure that most fields which are varchar(255) would actually benefit.

Interesting idea, though I'm not worried about it at present, that's what beta is for, right? :P