Alex's fundamental point is sound, but his sample reply to the question about the jagged array is too undiplomatic to be of any use to anyone. Having some random on USENET tell me, "you're clueless; go study some introductory texts and don't write another line of code until you have" isn't going to get me to do so even if I'm not sure if he's wrong. Why didn't he just recommend a more appropriate database schema, accompanied by a suggestion that the OP read the Wikipedia page on normalization theory and try to keep his databases in 3NF?