Database Design Problem

[Kinl]

I'm working on a site that will have dynamic news content and the news has to go through some approval process, so I have two designs.. but I dont know which one to use.

Basically the news will have 3-4 stages that the news article can be in at any given moment.

1. News is written, but not submitted for approval.
2. News is approved or disapproved
3. News is either edited again (if disapproved), or approved
4. News is posted to the site.

My question is....

Should I store all the news information in one table and have an int field that stores a numeric value to show what stage its in? Such as stage 1 would be Written but not submitted, 2 would be approved, 3 disapprove, and so on and so on. This info would all be in one table. That theory works.... but there is also another theory that I have.
The other theory would be to have a written table, an approved table, a disapprove table, and a posted table. And the data just flows between the different tables for tracking and editing.


Which way would be better? Allow for expansion in the future?

Or is there another design that anyone can think of!!?

Thanx!!

kinl

 

[Junior1544]

both designs look good, but my thought is this:
how big is this database going to be... there is a limit as to how big a database can be, you can use the multiple table type and then split them into multiple mdb's aswell to be able to handle a much larger amount of data, just link the front end to the multiple backends... also you need to think about security, how many users are going to be using this, if it's alot you can use the front end/back end thery and deply the front end to each users pc... if it's just a couple, you can have each part in a shared directory on a pc...

(i say these things because you mention expansion...)

hope i've been helpfull...

--Junior Junior1544@yahoo.com
Life is change. To deny change is to deny life.

 

[Kinl]

The amount of users that are going to read this information is HUGE... about 2 million people a day.

But its going to be all through ASP.

I'm not familiar with the backend and frontend database linking.

I'm only going to be accessing this info from the web only.

Thanx!

 

[branko]

Hi,

The table with the current, valid and approved news is going to be read -and searched- by these millions. I think you want this table to be as fast as possible. Good indices to search on, no unnecessary data. I would just put the approved news here. In another table I would put the not (yet) approved news with a foreign key to a table that indicates the stage of approval or editing of the news.
When an article is approved it is inserted into the current news table and deleted from the preliminary table.
Maybe you also want a table for archived news articles. This will grow much larger than the current news table, but will be used less frequently.

Hope this helps you

Branko