RE: Design Question

From: Kenneth Naim <kennaim_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:27:02 -0400
Message-ID: <004001ca4e85$e0e59680$a2b0c380$_at_com>

I'll provide the consultant answer. It depends. If this is a datawarehouse then less joins and keep values in line is better. If this is an OLTP system then use a lookup table.  

Ken  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Balakrishnan, Muru
Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 12:58 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Design Question  

Hello Experts,  

I request your opinion on, whether column values in large tables with more than million rows should be codified for better performance. For example a customer table could have following columns, gender and card type. In our team many prefer to spell out the entire word for every row (as Male, Female, Credit Card, Debit Card etc), but my recommendation is to codify (M, F, C, D, etc) with a lookup tables when needed. Their argument is, hardware is cheap including storage, helps readability and less joins. My argument is, production hardware is not cheap (we can buy 1TB for home under $100, but production hardware costs thousands), less overall blocks used improves performance, negligible problem with joining lookup tables. Please give your opinion.  

Gender

---

M vs Male

F vs Female  

Card type

---

C vs Credit Card

D vs Debit Card,

P vs Prepaid Card  

Thanks in advance,

Muru  

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Fri Oct 16 2009 - 12:27:02 CDT