Re: maximum number of columns per table

Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1090301352.683762_at_yasure>...
> Moritz Klein wrote:
>
> > Hi NG,
> > 5 minutes ago I ran into maximum number of columns per table exceeded. I
> > found out that the limit is 1000 clumns per table on Oracle 9i. Is it
> > possible to raise this number with the use of Database Initialization
> > Parameters, or does upgrading to 10g provides any help on this? I read some
> > posts about this limitation befor but they provide no solution to this. The
> > Data-Model cannot/should not be changed.
> >
> > Any help appreciated
> > Moritz
> >
>
> If you hit the limit this issue is not the limit but rather your
> design.
>
> There is just about no excuse for having more than 50 columns in a table.
>
> If you think otherwise I would suggest you take a class on relational
> database architecture and normalization.
>
> Daniel Morgan

One excuse is that the users want it in Excel. It can be argued that a spreadsheet is quite relational - rows and columns, and that's it. Normalization is another matter, of course. What I've found is there are some cases where it makes sense to put things together with lots of rows and columns, and then let the user do what they want. Of course, a tool comes with the package they are using that allows fast conversion from a relational query involving many tables to Excel that makes this a lot more sensible than programming from scratch. Doing this with proper design and programming would cost 100 times more than necessary. Not including changing working business processes to artificially constrain output to a normalized model. I don't think you would try to sell that, you would just say "this is ridiculous" and go do something else... right?

But I think Jonathan really put his finger on it with the machine-generated idea, it is not the db's place to put an artificial limit on number of columns.
Just as Excel shouldn't place an artificial limit on number of rows. Your argument of bad design is backwards - design should lead where it leads.

jg

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