June 27, 2006 at 3:14 pm
we dealing with flat tables in SQL Server, as i am beginner, i dont understand how flat table is good enough to stored over million records in the database. As we are having alarming increasing rate in db.
June 27, 2006 at 3:27 pm
A flat table is fine for storing more than a million records.
However, if you find that there are a some columns with a lot of empty rows, it may not be the most efficient, as far as space is concerned.
If you find that there are columns with a lot of empty rows, you may want to break those columns out into related child tables. Then those columns can take up space only when there is data to store in them.
June 27, 2006 at 5:24 pm
All tables are flat. The question is whether the data in the table is itself flat. If the data isn't really flat but has been flattened to fit in a rectangular table, then data will be repeated. Not only does this waste space, it allows data to become inconsistent.
Do some reading about normalisation, then you can check whether the data in each table is normalised. Normalisation is the key to data modelling so you need to know about it.
Tim Wilkinson
"If it doesn't work in practice, you're using the wrong theory"
- Immanuel Kant
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