MYSQL - Storing lots of text fields in a single row

Question

I'm fairly new to PHP/MYSQL, I have a website which has multiple long forms, and more are added on a regular basis. The data from all the forms is stored in a 'data' MYSQL table.

The way I approached storing the data was to have 200 text columns (as my forms are up to 200 questions long). Not every question needs a text column, about 50% are just single integers or a few word answers, but as they vary in order this was the simplest way I could think of to make it work.

I've now discovered I can't seem to store more than 10 text values in a single row as I get the following error:

Row size too large (> 8126). Changing some columns to TEXT or BLOB or using ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED may help. In current row format, BLOB prefix of 768 bytes is stored inline.

Where am I going wrong and what's the best way to store data like this? I know 200 columns seems a lot and I've read this must mean I haven't normalised my data properly, but creating lots of tables doesn't seem to be sensible in this case, as all the data is connected on a single level to the form it came from. Splitting it in to 20 tables with data 1-10 11-20 21-30 just doesn't seem right?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Create a table where each field is a separate row:

CREATE TABLE Question_Fields (
    question_id INT, -- FK to Question table
    field_num INT,
    field_value VARCHAR(1024)
);

You can then join this table with the Question table to get all the text fields for that question.

Answer 2

This is the case in which you should consider NoSQL. You don't have a fixed schema.
Consider using MongoDB ^Tutorial

// connect
$m = new MongoClient();

// select a database
$db = $m->comedy;

// select a collection (analogous to a relational database's table)
$collection = $db->cartoons;

// add a record
$document = array( "title" => "Calvin and Hobbes", "author" => "Bill Watterson" );
$collection->insert($document);

// add another record, with a different "shape"
$document = array( "title" => "XKCD", "online" => true );
$collection->insert($document);

// find everything in the collection
$cursor = $collection->find();

// iterate through the results
foreach ($cursor as $document) {
    echo $document["title"] . "\n";
}

Answer 3

您应该将每个问题另存为行，并且在每行中都有列名fe id_field ...这样，您的表就不会有200列，而只有两列（取决于表中的其他列）...