My software (written in PHP) allows users to use an HTML form to enter information for their 'Resume'. There are several different elements of this 'resume' including the user's education, work history, awards, cover letter, and etc. Each element is unique in the data it contains. For example, education requires fields such as graduation year, school name, degree, etc.
My question is, what would be the best approach to store the resume data in a mySQL database? My current choices are:
- Create individual tables for each resume element (resume_education, resume_awards, etc.)
- Use a single table for all elements of the resume and insert the element data in the form of multi-dimensional arrays. (IE: one table that holds resume data with columns such as education, workhistory, blah blah. Data in education or similar field would be compiled into an array such as ("grad_year"=>"1990", "school_name"=>"Cool School") or something similar where the usage of indicating characters denotes a new field).
The first choice offers an ease of maintenance and coding whereas the second choice would seem to offer a substantial decrease in backup and maybe load times, and database maintenance. Maybe there is an altogether better approach? What would you recommend ?