Now, let's take a look at how we can go about implementing these new features.
We will start by implementing our database and work our way up from there.
Before we can really put an interface together, we need to discuss how the data for a profile will be stored. Here is the profiles table:
So let's discuss some of the fields that are somewhat less than normal. In this case, I am referring to the varbinary(MAX) field for the Avatar storage. With the MAX size constraint (not much of a constraint!), a person could technically store a DVD in this field. This of course would be ridiculous, so we need to make sure that there are some constraints on the front end so that file storage size is kept to a minimum. As you will see later, this field is essentially a character array!