space/storage

[Jim/Chris]

A table with 200 fields seems to be excessive and will
cause performance problems down the road. I suggest
breaking the table into 2 or 3 tables.

Jim

-----Original Message-----
have a person who has told me that given a table with say

200 columns in it... if I create a bunch of records in that
table such that only ID field contain a value, while the
rest of the fields are null (as in vbnull) that the amount
of storage is significantly less compared to if the fields
contain actual data. In otherwords, null fields take up
no storage (or at leat minimal).... I just tried the
experiement and it did not seem to behave that way ... even
with compacted DB.... So is what I was told true?

 

[Tony Toews]

A table with 200 fields seems to be excessive and will
cause performance problems down the road. I suggest
breaking the table into 2 or 3 tables.

Assuming that it should indeed be normalized, which would be likely,
I'd agree with you. If however it is normalized then I'd be more
concerned about hitting the 2K if Jet 3.5 or 4K if Jet 4.0 maximum
record size.

I'm not at all sure this would make much of a performance difference.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
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