Good ideas Ken. Thanks. The table has only answers, and several integer fields that help tie those to unit/section/page/element they relate to, and what custom-course/user they relate to (but integers don't take up much room). That's all. The questions and 'real' answers are in other tables. The user info (other than uid) is in another table.
That's half the problem, is it's a pain to join it up for decent reports if I need to do summarizing, counting or grouping for all the students in a course (one instructor is bringing in 700 students next Spring - maybe even in one class, though I hope not! -- good grief!). If there were only 20 students in a class I could do it, no big deal. But some of these courses are huge in qty students, so they time out my queries, and make the heavy loop-code a problem too. I'll try Tim's suggestion of using a temp table and see if that works it out. Sounds more reasonable than adding/dropping views/tables all the time, I was a little worried about that. Best regards, PJ On 6 Jun 2002 at 16:29, Ferguson, Ken wrote: > What type of data are in these tables that you are left with so many > records? I only ask as I wonder if it might be possible to separate some of > it. For instance, it seems you are dealing with test questions, answers and > students. If one of these HUGE tables is a table of all students, couldn't > you have separate tables for current and former students (or they might be > separated by some other means)? Also, could you not have separate tables for > questions and answers per test. If anything along these lines is at all a > possibility, I think it would make your life one that is infinitely easier > with which to deal! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This email server is running an evaluation copy of the MailShield anti- spam software. Please contact your email administrator if you have any questions about this message. MailShield product info: www.mailshield.com ----------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe / unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org
