| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
 |
 | |||
| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
|
| |||
Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Large databases
OK - here's a real-life example: HESA, the UK Higher Education Statistical
Agency, list dozens (verging on hundreds) of statistical/demographic code
values which they require to be entered for each student attending the
university. Any given student will be assigned one and only one value for
each of these codes, so even if we split off "HESA codes" as a separate
table from the rest of the data for a student (such as name, home address
etc), that still leaves us with a fully normalised table of "Student HESA
data" which has near enough a hundred columns.
Your final sentence is bizarre! Sure, normalisation leads to thinner tables, but thinner can mean "100 columns as opposed to 1000" just as readily as "4 columns as opposed to 12". It all depends just how many of those pesky attributes you've got in the application.
Paul Vincent
DBA
University of Central England
-----Original Message-----
Sent: 16 April 2003 19:09
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>From: Lyndon Tiu <ltiu_at_alumni.sfu.ca>
>An "Access DBA" told me after seeing my Oracle/Postgresql database ER
>Diagram:
>
>"Your database is too big. I took an Access course last year and the
>instructor mentioned that tables should have no more than 4 columns each."
Just a thought, but if you have more than 4 you're probably not normalized very well.
Chris Berry
compjma_at_hotmail.com
Systems Administrator
JM Associates
"Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken." -- Duke Leto Atreides
-- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Chris Berry INET: compjma_at_hotmail.com Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Paul Vincent INET: Paul.Vincent_at_uce.ac.uk Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).Received on Thu Apr 17 2003 - 06:38:37 CDT
 |
 |