Thread: DB Design

On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 15:37 +0800, Michael Ryan S. Puncia wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
>
>
>       My question is .. which is better design
>
>
>
>      1. Single Table with 50 million records or
>      2. Multiple Table using inheritance to the parents table

It's not that simple.

Given your e-mail address I assume you want to store Philippines Census
data in such a table, but does Census data fit well in a single flat
table structure?  Not from what I have seen here in NZ, but perhaps
Census is simpler there.

So to know what the best answer to that question is, people here will
surely need more and better information from you about database schema,
record size, indexing and query characteristics, and so on.


> I will use this only for query purpose ..

Then you may quite possibly want to consider a different database.
Particularly if it is single-user query purposes.

For example, there are some SQL databases that would load the entire
database into RAM from static files, and then allow query against this.
This can obviously give huge performance improvements in situations
where volatility is not a problem.

Cheers,
                    Andrew.

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The complete answer is probably "it depends", but this does not help
much...:-)

I would try out the simple approach first (i.e one 50 million row
table), but read up about :

i) partial indexes and maybe
ii) clustering
iii) think about presorting the data before loading to place "likely to
be accessed" rows "close" together in the table (if possible).
iv) get to know the analyze, explain, explain analyze commands....

Best wishes

Mark

Michael Ryan S. Puncia wrote:

> Hi Guys,
>
>
>
>       My question is .. which is better design
>
>
>
>    1. Single Table with 50 million records or
>    2. Multiple Table using inheritance to the parents table
>
>
>
>
>
> I will use this only for query purpose ..
>
>
>
> Thanks ..
>
>
>
>
>