Re: Normalizing vs. Denormalizing

epepa_at_aol.com (EPepa) wrote:
>I'm in the process of helping to develop an Oracle database for a plant
>that's very concerned with speed. They enter about 5000 orders per month
>and each order is one record (no detail lines). Since I took the Oracle
>classes, I have the normalization techniques down pretty well, but my
>concern is the time that it would take in disk reads in order to access
>the several tables required to normalize this company's orders. (Each
>order should store information into several tables that would have 4-5
>sets of 5-10 pieces of data each, for a total of about 35 denormalized
>columns.) If I denormalize the data, it would reduce the number of disk
>reads and all of the information should be fairly contiguous, but it seems
>to me that that would defeat the purpose of a relational database.
>
>Does anyone have any ideas on where you would draw the line?

Take a look at Oracle clusters. It stores data from related (normalized) tables together, by the key value. They may be what you need.

DL Kray Received on Mon Mar 18 1996 - 00:00:00 CET