Given that I have eight excel spreadsheets with all the data that is to be queried, is it better to have eight separate tables with foreign keys to link them all or one big table with eight columns but loads of repeats and have to use 'distinct'.
Surely the first is going to be easier to maintain than one very large table.
My general rule of thumb is only store data once. Having multiple copies of data is gonna get ugly--usually
So eight separate tables, and how do I deal with the differing amounts of rows in each table?
go google for normalization and that will answer your question.
Two basic rules of thumb:
1) never, under any circumstances, even if your life depends on if, should you store data more then once.
2) do not store what you can calculate.
