[eluser]tomdelonge[/eluser]
so, i'm creating some extremely simple forums, based around punbb (obviously i have to recode pretty much the whole thing, but i'm using their ideas). it's pretty minimal, but i had a look at a few different open source forums. phpbb3 and punbb. (some others too).
when i first learned php and mysql, i was taught never to repeat information in the database. for example, if you look up a post, then you look up the post_user_id and then from that you look up the user_id in the users table to get the username. It recently occurred to me that perhaps storing the username in the posts table would allow less queries.
is this bad practice? or should i design my tables so that less queries are used, rather than never repeating myself.
thanks for any guidance you can offer.
also, anyone have any idea how to say "last post: 15 minutes ago" like in these codeigniter forums, rather than "last post: 9:30". i think the former is a lot easier on the brain...