The AotW database contains just about everything displayed on the site, all the content. The text of all the articles, and resources like the Official Reports; pointers to, and properties of all images; information for military units, indivduals, weapons, tablets, maps, and casualties; bibliographic records; site change history and configuration. I rely on database id’s (keys) to cross-reference and link officers to units to weapons to reports to stats to maps, etc.

The database also stores new submissions from members and unfinished work staged for publication, is the basis for the peer-review and approval scheme, and manages user accounts and security/session state.

Database design is very much an issue. Not that mine is terribly well done! It would have been better if I had known what the database needed to do in its entirety before creating the first table, but the site didn’t spring fully formed at the outset. It’s been evolutionary. I’ve had to overhaul significantly at least twice in the past 3 years or so to include new requirements as we grew. I fully expect to have to do that again.

I use the term query, by the way, to represent any transaction to/from the database. The example above–searching for an indivdual–is common, but queries are also used to read configuration data and customize site presentation, add users accounts, promote articles to “production”, and so forth.

I don’t know what (if any) DB design tools are available specifically for mySQL, but I’m sure the large user community would he helpful. You might start at http://www.mysql.org/ Given that mySQL is pretty much SQL-standard, and does most everything a high-end RDBMS can do, you may not need to limit yourself to mySQL products.

YMMV!

ps. I know I put “.html” as a file type in the diagram above, but that might be misleading. I just checked, and there’s only one html file on the site (poster.html) – and that code’s embarrassing. Everything else is built on the fly from .php templates and includes, grabbing content from the database. Some other file types are .xml .js .png .gif .ico .css

This must be way too much information.