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On the last month I've done basically the impossible: I have a Debian server on a Intel Celeron 2.5Ghz / 512 MB RAM / >40GB IDE Hard Drive with MySql running smoothly. I managed to connect using MySql Workbench and then I realized that I didn't stop to think about the database model.

My current database is an Access 97 Database with 2 gigantic tables: Tbl_Swift - 13 fields and one of them is a 'memo' field with a full page of information. Tbl_Contr - 20 fields where FOUR of them are 'memo' fields with pages of information.

It's not like the database is heavy or slow on Access, but I wanted to make it available to most users... then I realized that I should optimize my database, but here's the problem:

WHY?

Will it make that much of a difference? I'll have less than 5 users connected to this database and NONE of them will have 'write' privilege, they'll just run some standard queries. The database itself is rather small, it's under 600MB and ~90K records.

So, should I really stop to think about making it more 'optimized'?

Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩
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Johnny Bigoode
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  • So... no one's making you do it, you don't want to do it... are you asking for a reason to care about good database design? Pragmatically speaking, if it ain't broke don't fix it. – Chris Eberle Dec 19 '11 at 20:29
  • Optimized for what, specifically? – Rooke Dec 19 '11 at 20:30
  • Actually I want to skip this part and upload all old databases to the MySql and start focusing on creating an application to connect to the database. When I say OPTMIZE I mean when people say I should have a lot of tables with little information - so focusing on modeling the database with the most normalization I can. At least I would like to know if it's a good idea to keep the databases big and chunky and worry about it later - in any case, should I spend time making the database as light as possible or can I afford not doing so since it's small database and small userbase? – Johnny Bigoode Dec 19 '11 at 21:00

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"When I say OPTMIZE I mean when people say I should have a lot of tables with little information"

What you are talking about is normalization, and recently there was a thread about normalization vs. performance here: Denormalization: How much is too much?

And yes, I believe that you should think about normalization before that DB gets too big.

Community
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Aaron
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  • I think I should have done more research on the subject also, this article gives a lot of good information on why should the database modeling be as good as it can: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/why-data-modeling.html – Johnny Bigoode Dec 20 '11 at 13:16