Symphony.

I have been playing with the hello world tutorial and modifying it to test my app concept, and I am a bit confused about the way the data is being stored.

I have for example a Contact screen with the following fields, BusinessName, Addressline1, Addressline2, City, PostCode, Contactname1, etc.

Now it appears that in the DB it is creating a separate table for each Field, so we have a sym_entries_data_23 for the Business Name, sym_entries_data_24 for the Address line 1, etc.

Is this the way that Symphony creates it Db Schema?

I would expect a single table with fields for each of the Contact columns.

or I am missing something?

Is this the way that Symphony creates it Db Schema?

It is. This extra level of normalisation means it’s much easier to create/destroy aspects of the schema at will.

Remember that “fields” are not a single value in Symphony. Fields require more than one column. For example a Text Input field uses two data columns, value and handle; the Map Location field stores several values for each entry, such as an address, latitude longitude and so on.

In this way, the “data type” of a field in Symphony go beyond standard MySQL data types (varchar, boolean, text etc) — they can be defined in their entirety and we are not limited to a single column for each field.

What you lose in performance/simplicity, you gain in flexibility.

Thanks Nick,

I suppose it’s taking normalisation to it’s ultimate, and thinking about it there may be lots of tables but they will be small in size.