Question about database design and Max number of tables in Oracle

Hi Oracle gurus,

We have a database design question which has me challenged.

Here is the situation :
The goal of the system is to be able to model any possible item. This is a consumer oriented site (kind of like Priceline's Perfect Yard Sale) where a user can enter what they have to be sold in a garage sale. They can also enter what they are looking for. An example is that a user might be interested in buying a 2 yr old Nissan Altima which is white or grey color and mileage is between 1000 and 23000. Another user might want a CD or a book or any consumer type item.
So the main challenge is to create the data model which will accommodate this requirement. What makes this requirement more challenging is that we need to be able to search against this data in real time. A user might want to search the inventory, for example, to find all cars which have between 2000 and 5000 miles.

One approach which helps solve the problem is to create a schema which stores the metadata for all possible items which can be accepted. So, this metadata would store definitions of all possible items such as Cars, Cameras, Music,........etc. The main problem with that is the efficiency is very bad. One brute force method is to create individual tables for all possible item types which we can define. So we will have tables for Cars, Cameras, Music etc. The main problem here is we would be dealing with a large number of tables. Our analysts project about 7000 tables. My question is - how does Oracle handle these many number of tables. What are the max numbers. If anyone has any experience in this kind of a situation, I would be glad to receive any tips.

Thanks for your time. Received on Wed Oct 04 2000 - 18:23:16 CDT