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On Monday 23 June 2003 22:19, Rudi Starcevic wrote:
> I"m not sure whether to have on larger table or 2 smaller one with a
> join table.
Theory says you are better off with the join tables. Practical reality agrees
with this. It takes a bit more work to write your select statements, but the
data is better for at least these two reasons:1) You won't have a lot of empty columns.2) You will be able to add,
rename,and remove features pretty easily.
There are more reasons, but they are not immediately obvious to the untrained
DBA. (Words like "data integrity" and "data consistency" start to mean things
when you become trained.)
With that said, it sounds like you are really intermediate with database
design. If you were a beginner, and if you barely understood what a table
was, (and if you were the guy who would be using it all the time,) I would
probably suggest you use the former method. It will work pretty well until
you want to add more features or until you start worrying about your database
size. At that point, I would explain how and why to use joins, and how to
convert your data over to the new design.
- --
Jonathan Gardner <jgardner@jonathangardner.net>
(was jgardn@alumni.washington.edu)
Live Free, Use Linux!
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