DB Design question

I hope this is not off topic for this NG.

My colleague is trying to achieve the following two difficult tasks and would appreciate any input you guys can provide.

1. He needs to store large numbers of user attributes in a table. In other words, for each user (say 15000+) he needs to store many thousands (potentially) of flags. Each flag itself is small - either a character, or simple boolean, or a number, but there are arbitrary (ie. unknown) numbers of these flags, and the number of flags is extremely large.

What is the best way to store such data?

2. Every minute his program measures how busy a system is and then he only wants to store the _last_ 50 of these measurements.

Can anybody suggest a good way to tackle the above two problems.

The things that he and I have come up with seem clumsy and would lack scalability.

Many thanks, I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Naran. Received on Thu May 15 2003 - 16:20:05 CDT