Table Design Question pls help..

Hi gurus,

I have two design question, could you please give some reccomendation :

(1) Instead of CHAR, I plan to use VARCHAR2 for all character type
column. This is to avoid having to use RTRIM for char comparison from within Forms application. Is there any bad impacts of this design decision ?

(2) We have two tables of organization membership, one for 'permanent'
member , the other for 'non-permanent' member. After two years, non-permanent member will become permanent member. The permanent member is 4.000.000 rows and the non permanent member is about 200.000 rows.
These two tables are separated because there are reports that are only dedicated to Non-permanent member, so that the query will be faster. BUT there are also reports that combine the two tables using UNION. Is using UNION with this amount of rows will cause any bad performance ?
Or these two table should be only one tables using member-type column ?

Thank you for any comments,
xtanto Received on Sun Oct 03 2004 - 08:37:51 CDT