Which Oracle book was this?

From: <dba_222_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:16:06 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <bca7bad6-febc-429d-b026-09c2346efb31@u65g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>


Years ago, I skimmed an Oracle book at the bookstore. I'm sure it was written by Tom Kyte.

In it, he critiqued a system that would store data in rows, instead of simple columns!
One criticism being that it performed very badly.

So, instead of a typical table structure:

field1
field2
field3
field4

There was a lookup table with field codes, and what they meant.

Fieldcode_id
Fieldcode_name

The "data" table would be structured:

Fieldcode_id
value
etc.

Doing simple queries was of course much more complex.

I remember reading words to the effect:
"How did it perform? Horribly, pathetically, awfully!"

I'm unfortunately dealing with such a system now, and would like to show this critique to the brass.

Which book can I find this in please?

Thanks a lot! Received on Fri Oct 24 2008 - 17:16:06 CDT

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