Hey everyone! I’m working on a pet project and trying to design the database schema. It’s been a while since I’ve done this from scratch. I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to have a separate table for countries and cities in MySQL.
Does it make sense to store this kind of data in its own table? Or should I just include it directly in other tables where it’s needed? I’m a bit worried about the potential overhead of having to look up the country table all the time. But I guess MySQL probably caches that stuff automatically, right?
Also, I’m not sure if country or city names change often enough to make them unreliable as enumerated values. What’s the best practice here?
I’ve been mostly using ORMs or working on the frontend lately, so I’m a bit rusty with database design. Any advice would be super helpful! Thanks in advance!