Would choosing a varchar field with 80 duplicate values, be a good candidate for indexing. Please take a look at my table structure. I am thinking of using the column odorant for indexing even though there will always be 80 duplicate values, per odorant, and there will be 350 unique odorants. Each odorant has 80 rows of data(A-AT). I am seriously wondering if this denormalization would actually give me a performance gain over normalizing the database. Any suggestions or comments are welcome. Also, I have gotten into the habit of creating a primary key with an automatically created number, is this unnecessary? I am seriously wondering just because of the amount of data that will be on disk and let alone the statistical calculations which I will need to do in memory.
Thanks, SpartaCruz CREATE TABLE Odorants( id MEDIUMINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, odorant VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL, row TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, A DOUBLE(4,20), B DOUBLE(4,20), C DOUBLE(4,20), D DOUBLE(4,20), E DOUBLE(4,20), F DOUBLE(4,20), G DOUBLE(4,20), H DOUBLE(4,20), I DOUBLE(4,20), J DOUBLE(4,20), K DOUBLE(4,20), L DOUBLE(4,20), M DOUBLE(4,20), N DOUBLE(4,20), O DOUBLE(4,20), P DOUBLE(4,20), Q DOUBLE(4,20), R DOUBLE(4,20), S DOUBLE(4,20), T DOUBLE(4,20), U DOUBLE(4,20), V DOUBLE(4,20), W DOUBLE(4,20), X DOUBLE(4,20), Y DOUBLE(4,20), Z DOUBLE(4,20), AA DOUBLE(4,20), AB DOUBLE(4,20), AC DOUBLE(4,20), AD DOUBLE(4,20), AE DOUBLE(4,20), AF DOUBLE(4,20), AG DOUBLE(4,20), AH DOUBLE(4,20), AI DOUBLE(4,20), AJ DOUBLE(4,20), AK DOUBLE(4,20), AL DOUBLE(4,20), AM DOUBLE(4,20), AN DOUBLE(4,20), AO DOUBLE(4,20), AP DOUBLE(4,20), AQ DOUBLE(4,20), AR DOUBLE(4,20), AS DOUBLE(4,20), AT DOUBLE(4,20), PRIMARY KEY (id), UNIQUE UC_id (id)); --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
