there's such a big tradeoff between flexibility of a script and memory usage. for instance, i used to store all the table names as variables that were predefined in a file.

this made it easy to change the names of tables (because they used to be named rather haphazardly) ... but this means everytime a page loaded, 2KB worth of data was also stored as variables ... inefficient waste of memory.

anyways, i'm moving the queries over to hard-encoded table names in the sql queries themselves. hey, i'm only really using this for myself, and how often am i going to change the name of database tables?