Re: how to update portion of the varchar type data

hkgirlygirl_at_aol.com (Hkgirlygirl) wrote in news:20021129173625.29378.00008214_at_mb-mg.aol.com:

> First, I would like to thank Martin and Norman
> for their help !!
>
> Paul, to answer your question,
>
> One of the project requirements that I am designing require the database
> to keep track of, example, quantity of
> different item numbers, however, the exact number
> of item numbers is unknown , so to avoid keep asking our DBA
> to add columns, I think of using a varchar type field and keep all
> different items.
> e.g column 1-3 of varchar(30) stores item 1 data, column 4-6 stores
> item 2 data etc etc..

I'm not sure if you realize this but the above solution will have problems scaling if you plan on doing any searching within the data. No index will be able to support the queries which, if not given additional data, will result in a table scan.

-- 
Pablo Sanchez, High-Performance Database Engineering
http://www.hpdbe.com