MySQL time table data structure

Question

I'm making an air conditioning scheduler website for school. A user will be able to add a temperature and humidity setting for any of the 30 minute intervals throughout the day, for seven days of the week. For example, a user will be able to say that on Sunday, at 3:30 PM, they want the cooler (rather than the heater) to cool their home down to 70 degrees and a humidity index of 50 for 15 minutes. I could use advice setting up a MySQL table (or tables) to handle such commands. It's not the individual variables for all the potential settings I'm worried about, but rather handling all those times for all seven days.

So far I am thinking of having one big table called Scheduler which would handle the entire week. The day AND time slots for the seven days of the week could go into a VARCHAR column called time_slot, and would have both the day and the time slot in military time. For example.

time_slot (a VARCHAR column)
sunday_0000 (this is sunday at midnight)
.....
sunday_1630 (this is sunday at 4:30 pm)
.....
sunday_1130 (this is the final possible sunday time slot at 11:30 PM)
monday_0000 (this is the start of monday)
(continue for all seven days)

the remaining columns for the table would be all the necessary settings a user could put, as well as a duration from 30 seconds to the full 30 minutes before the next potential time slot. Does anyone have any ideas for a more efficient MySQL table? Perhaps something that gives each individual day it's own table?

Answer 1

You may want to consider having multiple columns, using TINYINT for day (1-7) and TIME (00:00-23:59). This way one could set the time for each days individually or all at once.

eg UPDATE scheduler set ... where TIME = '12:00';