[dba-SQLServer] VLDBs, the saga - Ramblings only

Charlotte,

I intend to do some experiments and calculations.  What do you mean by
dimension tables?  Are you talking about what we call lookup tables, i.e. a
state table with a PK, replacing the state text with a FK relating back to
the lookup table?  I thought about this and can't decide whether the time to
perform the join on 65 million records would completely outweigh any
benefit.  I will have to index some of these fields in order to do the
slicing and dicing.  Any true / false from what I know don't benefit from
indexes since there are only two values.

Any suggestions for how to speed this up are welcome.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Charlotte
Foust
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 11:44 AM
To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] VLDBs, the saga - Ramblings only


>From what John has described, he has, in essence, a data warehouse.  It
could certainly be broken up into one or more fact tables with dimension
tables to make the slicing and dicing easier, but you still wouldn't wind up
with "normal" normalization, just 1NF tables.  I've worked with this kind of
data on a smaller scale (I used to work for a company that would have been a
customer of that kind of list).  I suspect the demographics they're using as
selection criteria should probably be put into dimension tables, which will
actually make the database bigger but will make the queries MUCH faster and
easier.

Charlotte Foust


-----Original Message-----
From: Shamil Salakhetdinov [mailto:shamil at users.mns.ru] 
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 6:49 AM
To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: Re: [dba-SQLServer] VLDBs, the saga - Ramblings only


John,

I didn't know they are these simple T/F...

Why your database is getting so huge then? Do you have any
explanations/calculations?