[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“If you’re a typical PHP developer, it doesn’t take a
thorough review of past projects to pick out a telling pattern: In
most (if not all) cases, you’re probably getting PHP to talk to a
database back end for all that dynamic data goodness; in 99 percent
of those instances, you’re using MySQL.“Now, there’s nothing wrong with using a relational database. If
you’re working with highly structured data with lots of
relationships, it’s the way to go. You can happily (or unhappily,
depending on your familiarity and comfort with SQL) go through the
process of working up schemas, normalizing data relations, setting
up tables, and all the rest.“However, every once in a while, you work on a project where you
probably think to yourself, “Why am I doing all this work?” The
project you’re working on contains very simple bits of data or data
that’s difficult to predict — you might get different data
fields on different days or even from transaction to transaction.
If you were to create a schema to predict what’s coming down the
pike at you, you’d end up with tables that have lots of empty
fields or lots of mapping tables.”