Re: DB Design question

Bob,

I guess you're right I need more info' from my colleague to determine what he is upto
etc.

Many thanks for taking the time to reply anyway.

Naran.

Bob Badour wrote:

>"Naran Hirani" <N.Hirani_at_hgmp.mrc.ac.uk> wrote in message
>news:ba10co$pdi$2_at_niobium.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk...
>
>
>>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?
>>
>>
>
>Without any knowledge of how these flags will be used, which applications
>are most time-critical etc., it is impossible to say what the best way to
>store them is. When you say there are unknown numbers of these flags, I
>suspect the relationally correct way to represent them is with a relation
>per flag or per small handful of closely associated flags. If you want to
>physically cluster all of the flags per user, I don't think you will find
>any products with sufficient physical independence.
>
>If these are stable user-attributes, you may want to investigate a directory
>service like LDAP.
>
>
>
>
>>2. Every minute his program measures how busy a system is and then he
>>only wants to store the _last_ 50 of these measurements.
>>
>>
>
>SQL does not provide any concise quota query operation and the possible SQL
>solutions are quite complex as a result. A better relational language would
>simply have a quota query operation or at least some other partition
>operation.
>
>I seem to recall that Dennis Shasha and Philippe Bonnet recommend kdb for
>similar problems in their performance tuning book. While I don't like kdb's
>changes to the logical model, if it provides an immediate solution, you may
>just have to hold your nose and choke it down.
>
>
>
>
>>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.
>>
>>
>>
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Received on Fri May 16 2003 - 13:21:44 CEST