Hello!
Please excuse me if this is a stupid question, but I just have a quick one...

If you have a site where users can register with 2 options, free registration and a pay registration where you would get more features, is it better to create 2 tables for the 2 different types of users? Or does that just slow down searches etc if you want to be able to search through all the users at once?

Could somebody please advise me on the best way to go about this?

Thank you in advance. I do appreciate the advice

Have you ever done programming in your life before?

Have you ever done database structuring?

If the answer is yes to both of those then merely you get some relational tables on the go with keys and foreign keys.

If the answer is no, then i heartly suggest you go and read up on both of those, take a trip down the library with good ole pen and paper and do some research!

Happy coding!

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Apocolypse2005, I'm a programmer - of sorts.

In a situation like this, I would say it's clearly best to create both types of users in one database table. Paying vs. free clients will simply be the two roles you have to start with. Create a roles table with an entry for Free user and a second entry for paying user. The most scalable way to connect the two is to create another database table with two fields, one for role ids and one for user ids. In this way you can create records which match a user to a role, and users can have multiple roles (even though at this point your application won't need to do that).

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Or you could just add a column in your "user" table which has 2 different values for paying and non-paying users (say, 1 and 2 ). What about that ?

Mike