Re: database performance questions

On Fri, 04 Feb 2000 00:49:51 GMT, "Kreiner Karl" <kkreiner_at_carinthia.com> wrote:

>Hi everone,
> I'm currently planning a database architecture , that administrates
>documents . The structure ( properties ) of such documents may vary, so I
>decided to build an architecture that makes it possible for the user to add
>or change properties.
>The properties may be numeric, strings or date-time values, so I currently
>decided to build several tables: one for holding base information about the
>document ( author, createtime , ...) , one table for numeric fields, another
>for their contents, one for string-content and so on. This ends up in loads
>of related tables and I' worried about performance problems running queries
>on this structure. ( concerning an amount of estimated 100000 up to 200000
>documents. )

What I gather from your post indicates that you're planning a sort of a database-backed web magazine or something similar. In this case, have a look at http://www.slashcode.org/ -- these folks have done it and made it public, including their database design. Many of your questions will be explicitely answered by example. I'm not saying it's the best approach (because I honestly haven't seen enough to be comfortable deciding), but it definitely works for great many people, including the guys who run Slashdot in the first place.

>So my question(s) is/are :
>(1) Is their a more simple or efficient way to implement such datastructures
>on a relational database ?

Possibly. You could just stick to a stiffer structure, with many possible article parts hardcoded as database fields or links to other tables, and at runtime only show those that aren't empty/null. In general, the more flexible the design, the harder it will be to program and the slower it will run, but OTOH the more possibilities your site will feature.

>(2) Or should I implement a database system on my own ? :-((

??

>(3) Concerning relational databases : Would Oracle 8 be the best decision to
>avoid such performance problems ?

Uh, man, I don't mean to be condescending or anything, but if you have to ask a question like this (which could be worth up to $50k in software), maybe it would be in your best interest to hire a subcontractor to do the job? Slash runs on mySQL and it's blindingly fast (no transactions, though, IIRC).

Tomasz Received on Fri Feb 04 2000 - 00:00:00 CET