Re: Which Oracle book was this?

On Oct 25, 12:29 am, Michael Austin <maus..._at_firstdbasource.com> wrote:
> dba_..._at_yahoo.com wrote:
> > 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!
>
> I was aware of at least one system - for a name-brand pharmaceutical
> company that used this design.  How did this one perform?  It was
> running DEC now Oracle/Rdb (OpenVMS) and when tuned properly really
> screamed.  Yes, the queries were very ugly, but when properly configured
>   - did very well.

This just doesn't sound right.

> One benefit was it flexibility in self-describing the contents.  When I
> first arrived at the site and saw this design, I was very skeptical as
> to how it would perform.  Using MIXED Storage areas (loosely analogous
> to a IOT where index and the data for that index reside in the same data
> page (extent in Oracle terms)) performance was more than adequate.

Reasonable designs for a relational database are done using ERD's and 3nf. Received on Sat Oct 25 2008 - 17:58:45 CDT