Hello Ken.  I take your point about XML Atom feeds.  A big drawbig of XML is it is stuck with representing top-down, tree-like structures.

What you are doing by putting a comma-seperated list of values in a single column of a table is turning another table through 90 degrees.  The problem, apart from the obvious one of there now being data items in this table that are not identified by the key, is one of scalability.  How long is the field? 1024 characters?  What happens when it runs out of space?

I know that in this application you are not exactly writing a multi-user client/server database application with many concurrent users and transactions happening every few tens of milliseconds, but compromises should not be made in the interest of programmer comfort with the SQL.  That ultimately leads to performance compromises.

But even with the largish number of shows to date and the number of hosts, it doesn't represent a big dataset.  But a system which can support something big from the start will not need tearing down and re-hashing as things grow.

I guess your hands are a bit tied if you don't know the future platform resources, like whether you will always have a sensible RDBMS back-end available.

My show was pretty theoretical.  I'm more used to large systems.  In the past I have worked on e-commerce systems for big vendors, and on world-wide client/server stuff.

I usually take the attitude that a heavy-duty solution can handle small-fry without breaking into a sweat, but the reverse is not true.  That's scalability