seeking advise on DB tables, split or not split

Hi, I have a rather naive question about DB table design. Any advise or help will be highly appreciated.

When I have a object with a lot of member attributes, say 50 of them. If these attributes do not really stand alone and values are not shared by different objects, I do not really have a case to normalize them out when disigning tables for this object. The table can potentially grow very big, and I will need to search throw all the records to retrieve relevant object info. Which one of the following is a better choice, that gives me most flexibility and good search performance.

1. Since I do not have a case for normalization, I keep everything in the same table. A table of 50 columns, uniquely identified by a key. I search through this table when I need to, without any join.
2. I split the big tables into portions, shared the same unique key. The argument is that the tables get smaller, then you get better performance when searching on a perticular column, and smaller tables are more flexible and easier to maintain. But I am worried about the join that will have to take place when searching for multiple values, which might kill the performance.

Can some one advise me on the pros/cons on the above two approach, and maybe there are more choices that I have? What is the standard practice?

Thanks a lot for your help!

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Before you buy. Received on Sun Apr 09 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT