Alex Rivera | Logout

Should a user's profile be a separate model?

Asked 2009-11-09T22:43:48.057
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I'm learning Rails by building a simple site where users can create articles and comment on those articles. I have a view which lists a user's most recent articles and comments. Now I'd like to add user 'profiles' where users can enter information like their location, age and a short biography. I'm wondering if this profile should be a separate model/resource (I already have quite a lot of fields in my user model because I'm using Authlogic and most of it's optional fields).

What are the pros and cons of using a separate resource?

ruby-on-rails database-design
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Depends on the width of the existing user table. Databases typically havea limit to the number of bytes a recird can contain. I fyou are close to (or over which you can usually do if you have lots of fields with null values) the limit, I would add a table with a one-to-one relationship for better performance and less of a likelihood of a record that suddenly can't be inserted as there is too much data for the row size. If you are nowhere near the limit, the add to the exisiting table.

answered 2009-11-09T22:48:31.713

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