Hello:

I have a collection of physical parameters associated with different items. For example:

Item, p1, p2, p3
a,     1,  2,  3
b,     4,  5,  6
[...]

where px stands for parameter x.

I could go ahead and store the database exactly as presented; the schema would be

CREATE TABLE t1 (item TEXT PRIMARY KEY, p1 FLOAT, p2 FLOAT, p3 FLOAT);

I could retrieve the parameter p1 for all the items with the statement:

SELECT p1 FROM t1;

A second alternative is to have an schema like:

CREATE TABLE t1 (id INT PRIMARY KEY, item TEXT, par TEXT, val FLOAT)

This seems much simpler if you have many parameters (as I do). However, the parameter retrieval seems very awkward:

SELECT val FROM t1 WHERE par == 'p1'

What do you advice? Should go for the "pivoted" (first) version or the id, par, val (second) version?

Many thanks.