[thelist] Database Design Question

Joshua Olson joshua at waetech.com
Wed Mar 2 09:46:53 CST 2005


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Luther, Ron
> Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 10:23 AM
> 
> Both good answers. I use both of these techniques and I can certainly 
> think of a number of situations where each may be considered 
> the 'best' 
> approach.
> 
> However, (as a 3rd opinion), I don't think it's so rare to find that 
> 'storing' the calculation, for other situations, may, in fact, be the 
> 'best' approach.

Ron,

You're two examples are typical OLAP solutions.  It's common practice to
translate data that is optimized for Transactions (OLTP) into a form that is
optimized for reporting (OLAP).  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLTP

This last link amplifies many of the suggestions provided on thelist:

http://www.sqlsquare.com/viewtip.asp?tipid=2

As a rule of thumb, do not represent the same data twice in a single
database.  Keeping detailed records plus summary records would be a
violation of this rule of thumb.

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua Olson
Web Application Engineer
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com/service_areas/
706.210.0168 




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