it's the most flexible and fastest to query.
Mmm, that's debateable. Not knowing the ins and outs of MySQL I'd hazard a guess that reading an extra 255 bytes from the table file might be faster in some circumstances than opening two extra table files. And I don't see why it's more flexible...?
The latter two solutions I suggested are certainly easier to work with and (with todays hardware), speed isn't always a factor.
--
Richard Heyes
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