Single or Multiple Tables?

Hi

I was wondering which of the design approaches below would be better:

Within the admin section of a website administrators can upload
Resources for inclusion throughout the site. Now, these Resources can
be either images, videos or documents e.g. PDF's, etc.

Which of the following solutions would be best?

1. Creating a single table named Resources into which all resources
would be inserted, then having some way of differentiating between the
different types of resources e.g. a 'resource_type' column; or

2. Creating separate tables for each type of resource e.g. Images,
Videos, Documents and inserting each resource into the appropriate
table.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

On Aug 12, 3:46 am, Ian Oxley wrote:
> Hi
>
> I was wondering which of the design approaches below would be better:
>
> Within the admin section of a website administrators can upload
> Resources for inclusion throughout the site. Now, these Resources can
> be either images, videos or documents e.g. PDF's, etc.
>
> Which of the following solutions would be best?
>
> 1. Creating a single table named Resources into which all resources
> would be inserted, then having some way of differentiating between the
> different types of resources e.g. a 'resource_type' column; or
>
> 2. Creating separate tables for each type of resource e.g. Images,
> Videos, Documents and inserting each resource into the appropriate
> table.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks

From the information you gave, there is no clear answer.

A DATABASE is a model of the external world. So the question is: what
are you modeling?

One way to get at the answer is to ask how you would query the
database. Does you plan to search for resources or would you be
searching for images, documents, etc. What would your WHERE clause
look like? You gave no other attributes for these "resources".

Or are you just using the database as an expensive file system?

Ed