General question about table creation- Two tables or one?

emilybartholomew · Mar 4, 2002

I was wondering if anyone could give me some general advice on this issue. I am creating a database to hold prices of electricity. The table I have so far is (basically) as follows:

Timestamp
Location
Price

However, these prices are given both by zone (geographical area) and by generator. Should I keep all these prices in ONE table (with fields Timestamp, Location_code, Price) or in TWO tables, to separate the zoanl and generator data?

Zro · Mar 6, 2002

Emily,

General DB design principle: build tables as 'tall and skinny' as possible. However, your application doesn't look like it will have millions of records - so combining the data into one table looks to be OK unless there is no relationship at all between 'Zone' and 'Generator' records.

ie don't worry to much here about 'proper design' - just use plain old common sense around how the data will be used and build your tables to best accomodate that.

HTH

EJ

emilybartholomew · Mar 6, 2002

Thanks. That's just the kind of advice I was looking for.

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General question about table creation- Two tables or one?

emilybartholomew

Technical User

Zro

Programmer

emilybartholomew

Technical User

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