Table storage question

My boss asked me to create a general purpose table that we can use to hold responses from a variety of customer interview forms. The table would consist of 20 char(1) fields and about 100 varchar2(255) fields. To add to that, I have to migrate an existing customer table to use the new general purpose table. The existing table has about 66K records.

I had an alternate idea to create a table that would hold a key and value pair, resulting in a record for every answer on the form, not just one big record representing the whole questionnaire. (I hope that was clear). So, my big question is, what are the pros and cons of a large numbers of columns but small amount of data vs. a few columns but a large amount of data?

I can be more specific if no one can figure out what I'm trying to ask <g>.

Larry Molter
Diabetic Supply of USA Received on Sat Aug 30 2003 - 14:02:28 CDT