How to design a database where the main entity table has 25+ columns but a single entity's columns g
- by thenextwebguy
The entities to be stored have 25+ properties (table columns). The entities are pretty diverse, meaning that, most of the columns are empty. On average, I'd say, less than 20% (<5) properties have a value in any particular item. So, I have a lot of redundant empty columns for most of the table rows. Almost all of the columns are decimal numbers.
Given this scenario, would you suggest serializing the columns instead, or perhaps, create another table named "Property", which would contain all the possible properties and then creating yet another table "EntityProperty" which would map an property to an entity using foreign keys? Or would you leave it as it is?
