Quote - what you're suggesting is a many to many join.  you need a table of images, a table of galleries, and a table to join the two.  and that assumes one genre, not multiples. in which case you'd need a genre table and another many to many join table of images to genres.  now that's fine if they've already built it that way.  since gallery and genre have ids, they might have.  but given the existing functionality, my guess is that they have a table of galleries, a table of genres and an image table with a genre column with holding genre id and a gallery column holding genre id, and an author column holding user id.

if that's the case, it's a total rearchitecture of the database.  and it's the case i'm betting on, since mostly programmers don't make their jobs unnecessarily hard on themselves.  pulling from a join table mean more complex queries and more to keep in your head.  and i'm betting that it's a complete no to rearchitecture the database, as it means not only transforming  loads of data, but  probably recoding every line of code that makes up the galleries.

it always amazes me how people think if they can imagine it, it must be simple for  a computer to do.  not a dis, it's just no one thinks, "i don't know what's involved with making a new bathroom, it must be incredibly simple because i can imagine one right there."  but somehow, people think if they can imaging a computer doing it, it must be easy to make it happen.

 

I've done this kind of work on a fairly regular basis, using MS SQL Server. It's not that hard. Takes a couple of hours to program at most (though a LOT depends on ANSI92 compliancy of the DB engine).
If Bondware runs on MySQL 4.x, you're in trouble, however. It lacks some important features. MySQL 5.x has fixed most of those problems.

The data migration could take some time, however. The migration script will be quite complicated since the size of the database prevents converting in one go, the machines would run out of memory.

As for the client application, again, it's not that bad, provided you're using views instead of client-side complicated SQL statements.

In short: it can be done, but it requires a) a capable database programmer b) several hours of Renderosity downtime.

I'd love to see this functionality, I've asked for it before. But I'm afraid the staff has other priorities.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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