Title: Understanding Database Design
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# Understanding Database Design

 *  [blueshark](https://wordpress.org/support/users/blueshark/)
 * (@blueshark)
 * [16 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/understandig-database-design/)
 * Hey Guys,
 * I am working on a plugin for importing users into wordpress. Since I need more
   information about the users than the table users provides to store, I store additional
   information in the Table usermeta. Here the question came to my mind, why the
   architects of that database did not choose the pair (user_id, meta_key) to be
   unique? In that case, I could easily update the table with the keyword REPLACE
   without having dublicated entries.
 * BlueShark

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *  [MichaelH](https://wordpress.org/support/users/michaelh/)
 * (@michaelh)
 * [16 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/understandig-database-design/#post-1109286)
 * Can’t address the “history of” but take a look here:
 * [https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7540](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7540)
 * and
 * [https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8949](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8949)
 *  Thread Starter [blueshark](https://wordpress.org/support/users/blueshark/)
 * (@blueshark)
 * [16 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/understandig-database-design/#post-1109374)
 * Thank you for the links 🙂

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘Understanding Database Design’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [database](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/database/)
 * [user](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/user/)
 * [usermeta](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/usermeta/)

 * In: [Everything else WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/miscellaneous/)
 * 2 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [blueshark](https://wordpress.org/support/users/blueshark/)
 * Last activity: [16 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/understandig-database-design/#post-1109374)
 * Status: not resolved

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