Re: maximum number of columns per table

tunity5_at_yahoo.com wrote:
> I would be interested in learning more about the kind of
> domain/database design that requires 1000 columns in a table. I am
> just curious as to the application that needs to support this. Just
> imagine different applications/modules for update/delete/insert of a
> few columns each! Or even, from a human factors perspective, how
> would developer(s) deal with 1000 columns, remember them individually
> or their relationships to each other?

My background:
I am currently working at a chair for statistics and mathematics of the University of Mainz.
We do researchs on economical status related to human behaviour and expectations.

This is what I have to do:
There are 10 Waves of a panel study, each wave consists of four tables (provided in tab-delimited ASCII), befor being able to insert the data I have to process the whole thing because of tab-delimited and missing values only being a blank. This for I wrote some perl script to process the rows and make "\t \t" change to "; ;". The first row of every file is a header, I use this to generate my create table statements. Within the processing I generate create-scripts, control-files and a batch-file to trigger data-import with the use og SQL*Loader. I was told not to change the design of the tables. That's why I said modell cannot be changed. But I think the design needs a change as Sybrand already stated. I had to deal with large national surveys befor but never ran into this problem. Missing data and changing value-names between different years mainly produced the headache until now.

> Could you please elaborate on the type of the application? While you
> noted that the design is not to be changed, there may be other ways to
> manage this in the future or in other projects.

As stated above the design comes with the data, provided by some 3rd party. Type of application will be the aggregation of economical data to find reasons that control human behaviour and expectations. We will make extensive use of PL/SQL-Functions for decoding numbers to human readable, views for aggregating where its easy as well as PL/SQL-Functions that agregate the data and provide for example economical status for a benefit unit.

Wow, that took a while. I tried to be as clear as possible but it's nearly 1:00 so maybe I did not achieve this completely. Hope you got an overview of application and purpose.

Cheers

    Moritz Received on Mon Jul 19 2004 - 17:54:46 CDT