no fo columns

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no fo columns

sqlpro

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August 23, 2005 at 3:57 pm

#111633

Hi friends
we need ur advise on database design.we r currently in the process of migrating visual foxpro to sql server.some of our foxpro tables have more than 100 columns each.
if we migrate it to sql server as it is ,is there any performance loss?
what is ideal no of columns should we keep in sql table ?
any other design issue i shoould consider ?
Thanks for ur advise.
Cheers

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Ian Yates SSCoach Points: 19738 More actions · Answer 1

SQL should be able to cope with the volume of data you stored in FoxPro, although you might consider partitioning some of those wide tables and joining on them when necessary.

Additionally, with DBs like FoxPro, the tendancy on the client side is to use lots of cursors with the concept of a "current row pointer". SQL supports this, but it (along with many other "server" databases) is optimised for set-based logic - you ask it for a set of results, it returns it, and that's the end of the conversation.

Finally, something I bump up against as we work with several pieces of software written in FoxPro - the date fields in FoxPro are a LOT more forgiving. We see dates in the year 1002 (the user had intended 2001) - whilst FoxPro will accept this date, SQL using datetime field will not. DTS just errors in an unhelpful way when transferring such data. The trick is to transfer it to a char/varchar column in SQL using a format of YYYYMMDD and then parse in SQL and replace bad dates (less than 1900) with some predefined value. I spent a while digging around the net and finally found FoxPro commands - use DTOS to format the FoxPro date this way...

Sorry to rant on about the last bit - I spent a while just the other day on this annoying problem on a large data import

sqlpro Hall of Fame Points: 3859 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks for post Ian.we'd consider ur suggestions in our design.

BTW do you suggest any website for good practices on database design,indexes etc.,

Thanks again

Ian Yates SSCoach Points: 19738 More actions · Answer 3

Ian Yates

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Points: 19738

August 23, 2005 at 7:55 pm

#584444

This site

sqlpro Hall of Fame Points: 3859 More actions · Answer 4

quick question Ian

am just impoting a table from foxpro to sql and got following error

Error: Preparation SQL Task: Warning: The table 'claim' has been created but its maximum row size (87839) exceeds the maximum number of bytes per row (8060). INSERT or UPDATE of a row in this table will fail if the resulting row length exceeds 8060 bytes. (SQL Server Import and Export Wizard)

any ideas ? whats that means.BTW this table has 183 columns!!

Ninja's_RGR'us SSC Guru Points: 294069 More actions · Answer 5

Table is too large. A row MUST fit in a data page or the insert fails. The data page size is 8060, so any row containing more than 8060 bytes of data cannot be written to the page so the insert/update would fail. This is just a warning that it may happen. That is where normalization is important... or vertical partitioning.

Ian Yates SSCoach Points: 19738 More actions · Answer 6

183 columns is HUGE! I hope you aren't selecting them all with select * all of the time - best to partition it and only select the columns you need...

As remi said, your table will work just fine, but if you put > 8060 bytes of data in there (remembering that an int is 4 bytes, GUIDs are 16, char(n)/varchar(n) are n bytes, 8 bits in a table form 1 byte, etc). You could partition the table into several and if you really absolutely must have that many columns (at least until you recode your app a bit more), then make a view with the name of the original FoxPro table which will join the tables back together... That would give you the benefit of allowing your legacy code to work without too many changes but any new code you write can use the more specific underlying tables.

If you have lots of varchar(x) columns, try reducing them down to what you really need... Eg, if you made everything varchar(500) then you have a maximum row size of 91500 (plus overheads). You may only store 10 chars per column, but since you *might* exceed the maximum you get a warning. Note that if you made the columns char(500), then regardless of the string length, 500 bytes is always occupied and you could not insert rows into the table (Remi: do nulls take up space?)

Cheers

Chris Hedgate One Orange Chip Points: 25041 More actions · Answer 7

Note that if you made the columns char(500), then regardless of the string length, 500 bytes is always occupied and you could not insert rows into the table (Remi: do nulls take up space?)

I'm not Remi, but I'll bite anyway. Yes, for fixed-size columns (like char) they use the full space. A varying-size column will not store anything (other than the 2 bytes overhead necessary for every variyng-size column) when the column is set to null.

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Chris Hedgate http://www.hedgate.net/
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