cluster or no cluster ?

From: Regine Marx <marx_at_ukl.uni-freiburg.de>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 16:15:43 +0100
Message-ID: <3A5C7C9F.B18D2343@ukl.uni-freiburg.de>

Hi,
I'm storing medical information in an Oracle 7.3 database running on NT 4.0 server. There are four main tables: the master table storing medical reports(1K each) and three detail tables storing additional information to a report: images (250K each!), numeric values(200 bytes each), and additional texts(1-3K each). At the moment these four tables are stored in a cluster with cluster key REPORT_ID. Because of the unequal space use of the cluster rows (some reports have images, some have none) I'm not sure if this is a good solution...
When I dropped the cluster on a test database and stored the tables separately the space usage for the database rose from 4.1 G to 7.5 G. There's no remarkable change in performance. Should I keep the cluster or not ?
Any recommendations ?

Thanks in advance
Regine Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 09:15:43 CST