more than 50 fields in a table ??

[PHPycho]

Hello forums!!
I had made a table which contains more than 50 fields..
I am afraid this will hamper later ..

What i want to know ?
1>how many fields should be in a table for optimization ?
2>what should taken into consideration for future hazards in case there are more than
50 fields in table ?

I would really appreciate the answers from you
Thanks in advance to all of you !!

[leatherback]

Hi,

In principle it shoul dnot give you any trouble.

The only thing I am worried about is whether you have optimized your data storage. How much information are you double-storing in your database?

As long as all these data are related, and have a one-on-one relation to eachother, you should be fine. However, if you are, say, storing personal information, and you have potentially up to 4 addresses to store you have a few options:
- Store all information in one massive table, and accept that half the colums will be empty half the time
- Store only the basic person info (Name, date of birth, password) in a users table, and link that to an addresses table.

The second is the preferred, as it obviously is much more flexible for future changes (we want 4 instead of 3 addresses; we want to add a second addressline), and stores only the required info, and less empty cell.

So.. Have a think about it, and possibly post the type of info, if you feel you might need to modify your design

[Piranha]

50 columns are really not that much, it is no problem to handle. If I don't remember it wrong MySQL can handle over 1000 columns, and other databases have simular column counts. But it still seems quite much with 50 columns that have, as leatherback says, a 1 to 1 relationship to each other.

As an example you should not have columns to list each property of an object. Let's say that you are selling apartments and have different things you want to know about the apartment, as an example if it have shower, bath tub, balcony and so on. Then it is best to have apartment in one table, property in another and a table that connects them. Sure it might work with one table, but what do you do when you want to add broadband to the list? Or when you want to count how many things in that list you have in the apartment? To make it simple you would be in trouble with only one table.

I strongly recommend that you read up on "database normalization" and make sure that you normalize to at least 3NF.