Hello everyone,

I'm new to the site. I was hoping to get some help on designing a datamodel for a dating site. The basic user data (username, sex, age, height, location etc.) will be in a USERPROFILE table, and will be searchable by the user.

What I want to do is store some additional information (non-searchable) like favourite movie, favourite sports team etc. as well. I want to be able to modify these fields from time to time. For example, I may want to add a field for favourite backstreet boy! How can I do this in a nice clean way? I have thought about storing this data as XML in a CLOB, this way if something changes, no big deal. I dont have to alter any tables, and it's fairly straightforward parsing XML. Anybody have any other ideas or suggestions?

you need to read this -- http://thedailywtf.com/forums/60879/ShowPost.aspx

why would you do in XML what you could do so much more easily in the relational database

Are you trying to get people to date a model, or data model?

Thanks for the reply. What I think it buys me by storing this data in XML is being able to change it on the fly in an easy way. All the searchable fields will be regular columns in the table. Data that can be added or deleted by the site administrator can be in XML format. For example, if the site admin wanted to add three new fields and remove two from the profile options, it can be easily done.