Re: one big tables vs. many smaller

Hi Steffen,

beside the fact, that some exchange of experience is always useful and help you find the better choice faster, I for myself found

• the appropriate structure depends heavily on the way users look at the date and query it. Without intimate knowledge of the requierements it's not easy to give more than general hints (the old "It depends!" answer)
• it's always useful to invest one or two days in setting up the possible structures, fill it with real-life amount of data and test the most sensible queries against them.
• from a development view, consider if there are new requierements, perhaps not nailed down, but you can smell them ;-) Which structure is more robust for future changes? Is the main efford in changing the application or migrating the data?

just my 2 cents

On Sat, 6 Apr 2002 10:57:50 +0200, "Steffen Ramlow" <s.ramlow_at_gmx.de> wrote:

>huch - did i ever talked about normalization?
>
>i talked about (read) performance and possible problems when using the
>DE-normalized design
>
>as i already said - i personally would _always_ use the normalized form, but
>i need hard facts against the denormalized form, that's why i posted the
>question
>
>this is what i think:
>
>denormalized:
>
>pros:
> better read performance coz no join is needed (is the join really to
>expensive?)
>cons:
> the table becomes really big
> -> maybe a performance hit
> -> maintenance difficulties
> many null values (what are the problems with them?)
> other?
>
>what i wanted to know is, what others think about this - i don't wanted to
>hear such general statements like "this is not normalized", this was clean
>right from the beginning
>

regards
Marc Blum
mailto:marc_at_marcblum.de
http://www.marcblum.de Received on Sat Apr 06 2002 - 05:05:35 CST