When creating a submission form, you generally want to have a table with columns corresponding to form fields.

In our example we will be building a registration form for guests at a University open-house. Our form fields (the information we are gathering are as follows:

Salutation

Select list with options 'Mr.','Mrs.','Ms.','Miss','Dr.'

First Name

The registrant's first name.

Last Name

The registrant's last name.

Email

The registrant's email address.

School

The name of the school that the registrant attends.

Grade / Level

The grade or level of education completed by the registrant.

If non student, select one:

Select list with options 'Parent','Teacher','Counsellor','Other' (and a text field to enter a value if the registrant selects "other".

Area of Interest

A select list of a number of areas of interest including 'Computing Science', 'Engineering', and more...

Campus of Interest

There is more than one campus so this is a select list for the registrant to choose the campus that he is interested in attending.

We will create our table as follows:

A couple of notes:

1. registrantid is an auto_increment column added to serve as a primary key for responses.  This is pretty standard.
2. Most of the fields directly correspond with a column of our table.  VARCHAR fields are used mostly for text input fields.
3. The ENUM field type is helpful for fields that offer a simple selection between a few options (e.g. non_student_type).
4. We will use a valuelist on the area_of_interest field to select the area of interest we want.  This field will store the integer id of the area of interest selected by the user.  We use this strategy because we want to be able to store the interests in the database in another table.
5. registration_date is used to timestamp when the form is submitted.