Fixed- vs. Variable-width tables

Hello -

A few years back I remember that it was very important to make sure that you defined tables w/ just fixed width columns (placing variable-width columns in a separate table), making it much faster to update the one table since it could be done in-place, and that fixed-width tables are generally more efficient. Now, the question is, how true is that statement nowadays, have new algorithms made that performance tweak unnecessary?

Assuming that I will query on the fixed-width table the most, should I go to the trouble of separating out the two tables?

Thanks in Advance, Chad Received on Fri Mar 15 2002 - 16:23:06 CST