How to add a current string into an already existing list

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 11:16 PM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> The limitation, of course, is that the data is opaque as far as the
> database goes; you can't do queries against it.  But, if all you need to
> do is store the list and be able to retrieve it, it's a perfectly
> reasonable thing to do, and a lot more efficient than doing a join on a
> secondary table.

Yeah, that can be an effective way to store complex data - especially
if the nesting level isn't fixed. (Normalization can handle a
single-level list, but it's a lot messier for handling lists of lists,
for instance.)

I still think that the OP's task would be best suited to a separate
table (one table of visitors, another of downloads, where the
Downloads table has a foreign key to Visitors), but I'm reminded of
XKCD 1027: the thing standing in the way of his code is that the
person coding it... is him. And of course, this is all without getting
into the non-code aspects of this proposal - as have been mentioned
several times, like EU regulations on retaining this level of data.

ChrisA