Database structure - To join or not to join
- by Industrial
Hi!
We're drawing up the database structure with the help of mySQL Workbench for a new app and the number of joins required to make a listing of the data is increasing drastically as the many-to-many relationships increases.
The application will be quite read-heavy and have a couple of hundred thousand rows per table.
The questions:
Is it really that bad to merge tables where needed and thereby reducing joins?
Should we start looking at horizontal partitioning? (in conjunction with merging tables)
Is there a better way then pivot tables to take care of many-to-many relationships?
We discussed about instead storing all data in serialized text columns and having the application make the sorting instead of the database, but this seems like a very bad idea, even though that the database will be heavily cached. What do you think?
Thanks!