Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

The Tale of the Too Wide Table

This book focuses on representing data in MySQL. The containers of tables in MySQL, and other products are the databases. It is quite possible to have just one table in a database and thus avoid fully applying the relational model concept in which tables are related to each other through common values; however we will use the model in its normal way: having many tables and creating relations between them.

Note

This section describes an example of data crammed into one huge table, also called a too wide table because it is formed with too many columns. This too wide table is fundamentally non-relational.

Sometimes the data structure needs to be reviewed or evaluated, as it might be based on poor decisions in terms of ...