Database Design Efficiency Question

Our group is using Oracle to manage a real-time Support Processor system. This system will in part collect performance statistics from remote clients.

During my design of the database, I realized that there are alot of different fields that must be defined in a 10-12 tables.

Only some of the fields (appx 10%) in any tabel may contain data at any time; The rest will not be populated == (char *NULL) or a LONG INT that contains no value.

My question relates to space efficiency and how to design a table so that many fields can be created, but the fields that are not populated during run-time applications do NOT use space in the database.

My question is simple:

	Is there a mechanism whereby I can define field(s)
	in the table that have their space dynamically allocated 
	by oracle during a ProC insert ?
	
	The fields have two data types: a) character arrays
	and b) long int's.  
	
	I suspect that this is possible with character array
	type info, but not for long int's.
	

Thanx,

Eric Edberg
att!iexist!elel Received on Mon Jan 27 1992 - 19:38:13 CET