Database structure - To join or not to join

Posted by Industrial on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Industrial
Published on 2010-03-22T09:45:34Z Indexed on 2010/03/22 10:41 UTC
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Filed under:

mysql

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relations

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data-structures

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database-design

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relational-database

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!

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