I need to put something together using mysql where, awards(hundreds) and badges(also in the hundreds) need to be listed and this is where I'm not sure which way to go---the awards and badges are military in nature and I need to be able to go through the db and figure how many recipients of each medal & badge exist and on the other hand, who has them. In one sense, I need to be able to print out stats but on the other side, need to be able to display a profile of each person and what awards&badges they have been awarded. I'm not real experienced at this and have read posts which say to avoid to many columns in a table, but the first thing that came to me was a "many column" table with each award as a column name and a default entry of 0 and after that an integer indicating how many times a person many have won a certain award using an id column to identify the person. I also thought to break up the awards into categories to make the tables smaller (less columns). Any input & direction much appreciated.
btw..if it makes any difference I'll be using perl for scripting.
