Database Structure For Articles and Categories

Question

Hi - This is a question about database structure - please help. Thanks
For a website with many subjects or themes is it best to use 1 big table to hold or the articles or many small tables to hold articles for different subjects - I will explain what I mean.
Say my website has a 'cooking' section, a 'sports' section and a general 'blog' section.
In each section the articles will be organized into different sub-categories but I can't see a way to do this.
Case 1: All the articles are stored in 1 table. There is a second table which 'assigns' an article to a category (the cateogries themselves are stored in a separate table) and also assigns a sub-category (sub-categories stored in a separate table???) and then what if there needed to be a sub-sub-cateogry?? This just doesn't seem to work well!
Case 2: For each theme there is a separate table - Cooking Table, Sports Table, Blog Table. And for each separate table there is a categories table Cooking-Categories which assigns each cooking article a sub-cateogry (and the sub-categories are stored in a separate table also) - and what if I needed to make a sub-sub-category - then would I need to make another table? This just sounds like a lot of tables even though the end result would probably be easier!
Case 3: All categories are stored in 1 table - as well as all subcateogires of those categories as well as all sub-sub categories, etc (each with an ID)... Each article is 'assigned' a category ID
Please someone show me the light! I am confusing myself.
Thanks
Chris

Answer 1

There is no 'best' way of creating a database. It's more logic that is involved in examining the parameters that determine what DB will suit your current requirement. These parameters may include but aren't limited to:
Latency
Performance
Sortability
Accessibility
Ease-of-use
Scalability
If I were you, for the said purpose, I'd create with 4 tables as follows:
Categories - this will hold your main categoriesCatID, Name, Order ID
Sub-CategotiesSubCatID, CatID (that the SubCat is linked to), Name, Order ID
Sub-Sub CategoriesSubSubCatID, SubCatID, CatID, Name, Order Id
ArticlesArticleID, SubSubCatID (can hold multiple Sub-Sub-categories) SubCatID (can hold multiple Sub-categories), CatID (can hold multiple Categotries), Name, Order ID, Article Title, Article Description, Article Thumbnail, URL Name, Metatags (for SEO, if you're looking at doing SEO)
The CatID in Article Table will usually be an INT value with limited chars, the SubCatID and SubSubCatID in Article Table will ideally be a varchar value with about 200 chars so you could assign multiple SubCatIDs to one article.
I'd like to add here that this is very much a debatable post. What suits me may not suit you and/ or the others who may read this post! But this way, I can accomplish my programming/ coding task/ CMS integration with ease-of-use.
Good luck with your DB!
~ST