Posted by Larry in Honolulu on 01/29/07 09:46

I'm helping a friend with a website (aren't we all) that will have a long
questionnaire. There will be about 150 data items, all of which will be chosen
from radio buttons with four choices each. I'll store the resulting data in a
MySQL data table, and I'm thinking I don't want 150 fields there. Since all
the responses can be coded as 1-4 (or 0-3), I'm thinking of storing them in
groups, with the values just strung together, and later decoded. i.e. 12132
24331 31142 etc. That would reduce the number of fields to a more manageable
size.

What I'm really wondering is, where's the tradeoff? If I store it as a string,
it could just be a simgle 150 character string. If stored as numeric (seems
more efficient) then I'd have to keep the max values in line with the numeric
type.

The data will eventually be used as numbers, but php can pretty easily convert
between so that doesn't seem to me to be an issue?

Any suggestions?

Thanks much,
Larry L [in Honolulu]

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