Database design

Databases
1

I need to make a website for a dating company. And I am realy wondering what would be the best way to design the database. I have a table members. holding details like: name, username, password, email, date of birth, city, and province. Furthermore the detail page of each member should hold certain characteristics like: marital status, sexual orientation, color of the hair, color of the eyes etc… Now I wonder should I have all these characteristics as varchars in the members table or would it be better to have them as foreign keys?

Thank you in advance

2

what’s more important to you, ease of developing the app and ease of members entering data, or accuracy/consistency of data to facilitate searching?

3

Hi Rudi. ease of development is not an issue for me. I just want the best way to develop this site, so accuracy/consistency of data to facilitate searching etc is very important to me

4

in that case, use foreign keys

5

Absolutely. Especially if you want to have users search on these keys any time in the future.

Searching through a million records for everyone with the eye color that’s smallint 1 is a hell of a lot faster than finding everyone with the eye color Blue, indexed or not. Or worse, finding everyone using a LIKE or searching for BLUE, Blue, and blue.