Design Question - variable number of elements per table

Hi,

I wondered if there was some sort of structure which enabled a variable number of elements per table - I'm pretty sure there isn't - but maybe there's a way.

Anyway, say I have a stock which is traded. I have any number of deals struck at various prices over time. So I have a "Trade" entity thus

Stock Id
Time
Amount
Price

I will take various snapshots of the trading history to work with.

Each snapshot can have a variable number of prices at which trades were struck with associated volume (sum of trades).

Can anyone think of a way I can have a meaningful 'Snapshot' Table such as

Stock Id
Snapshot time
+a variable number of Amount/Price pairs attached.

I'm implementing the DB on a standalone PC and I'm worried that as I will end up having hundreds of thousands - probably millions of Amount/price pairs, performance will suffer.

I don't mind the restriction that I can only access via the Stock Id/Snapshot time index - perhaps I can store the rest of the data as some variable length text field? Perhaps I can then parse this and extract the pairs as and when needed.

Any ideas/opinions appreciated.

I'm working with 10g. Received on Fri May 28 2004 - 13:33:32 CDT