On 09/23/2008 02:42 PM, Ben A.H. wrote:
I figured that was what you meant... I guess my table didn't work (see above
message...don't ya' love plaintext :-O)...
Has anyone ever tried to benchmark the difference between utilizing ENUMs
vs. traditional relational databasing? I would think ENUM is ideal for items
I specified at the beginning of this thread, items I would think would be
part of MANY (if not MOST) databases (state, country, gender, industry,
occupation, referredFrom, ethnicity, position)... In my case, it would allow
me to eliminate 15+ tables...
I'm just wondering why database ENUMS aren't used more often... (what's the
catch)
Just thought I'd jump in with some terms here: When you're saying
'traditional relational databasing' is kind of misleading. You're
probably still relational in some sense of the term even using a ton of
ENUMs. What you're talking about is fully normalized form. Take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
..to answer your question, normalization isn't done for speed. In fact,
I'd hazard a guess that fully normalized databases are almost always
slower than if the designed makes some shortcuts. What they provide is a
fully structured way to organize your data.
If you're just storing data, and you know there's only a limited number
of ways you're going to pull data out of the set, then I'd make as many
shortcuts as I could to provide speed. If you are using the dataset for
analysis, and you're not sure how the users are going to extract data,
then you may want to go further down the normalization road.
As with anything normalization can reach a point of dubious effect, but
it serves a very important purpose. By normalizing your data, and not
using things like ENUMs, you're maintaining an accurate data structure
which then can be arbitrarily used. But yeah, it's not necessarily fast,
probably the opposite.
Hope that helps.
-Micah
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