Herbie,
> Well bro, I don't really know who is completely right other than go
> with the Josh POV because of his experience.
Hey, it's not just my opinion. It's Relational Database Theory. Check out
Fabian Pascal's "Practical Issues in Database Design" or C.J. Date's "Intro
to Database Systems".
The idea is that your tables should be a normalized reflection of the actual
data. If your *actual data* is an array (such as a mathmatical matrix) then
definitely store it as an array. If it's child data (such as a list of sales
per item), then store it as a child table.
Taking shortcuts to "improve performance" when you don't even know that you
have a performance problem is foolish.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco