Re: Too many columns (rows) in a table

Personally - I'd choose option B because if next year, your company started selling products to Martians and Martian became a language to support on your database, then you'd have to do an ALTER TABLE just to add it. Option B allows you to add a gazillion languages to the database without a DBA having to be involved with an application data entry issue (disk space however, could possibly be an issue ...).

However - option B adds about 30-40 Meg more data to represent the extra product ID/ language ID (assuming about 10bytes to represent the product id) . But what the heck ... space is cheap ... and your database will be normalized better.

• Troy

caramel98_at_my-deja.com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have to create a table for the following:
> - 100 000 products
> - each product has 10 descriptions
> - each description must be in 30 languages
>
> If I create one table to contain all of the properties of the products,
> I'll have at least PRODUCT_ID + 30*10 = 301 columns.
>
> An other choice can be to use two tables:
> - table PRODUCTS with PRODUCT_ID and other columns
> - table DESCRIPTIONS with the columns
> - PRODUCT_ID
> - DESCRIPTION_ID
> - DESCRIPTION_LANGUAGE
> - DESCRIPTION
>
> The table DESCRIPTIONS will contain 100 000*10*30 = 30 000 000 rows
>
> Is there a best way ?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
Received on Sun Jan 23 2000 - 19:14:02 CST