Hi,

I have been pondering this one for a long time now and would really appreciate your expertise.

I have a table called user, it has an auto increment id column. It also contains columns for the username, password etc. AND columns for the users profile, about, interests etc.

Now I am not sure whether this profile data should go in the user table or if would be a problem splitting it into a profile table with a one to one relationship.

I would quite like to seperate the profile as I do see some logic. Right now I have a couple of other tables profile_comment, and profile_rating. A one (user) to many comments or ratings.

I am thinking about setting it up with a user table, and profile table, and have the relationship for comments and ratings pointing at the profile table.

Also, what about key names? For the comment or rating table, user_id could be named better probably? profile_id or profile_user_id. It is a bit odd with the one to one between user and profile.

Hopefully some sense can be made from this. Please check out the attachment. (Another area which has a similar problem is blogs. A user can have one blog, with multiple comments, a blog table? a blog_comment table. What would you name the keys?)

Thanks for your time

in your diagram, if each user can have only one profile, i would go with option 1

as far as the column names are concerned, name them whatever you like, whatever makes sense

Avoid 1-1 relationships. They are vestiges of a time when data storage was less efficient and data space was more expensive. These days, there is seldom a need for 1-1 relationships.

Thanks for the prompt replies.