Light or heavy?

Anon

I'm making a database and need to make the pages as light as possible... making them loading quickly.

So... what's the best way to set up a database?

One huge table wih all fields and SELECT statements which choose only the right colums
One table for each field (I have 4 different languages to insert) with an ID as primary Key
One table for each language
or doesn't it matter if I make the select statement as precise as possible?

Thanks mates!

Anon

You always want to minimize the amount of usless data in your tables. If you have 4 sets of data, and are only selecting 1 every time, then your query has to sort through and discard 75% of the data available to it.

It's best to have your tables be as clean as possible. Only put fields in a table if they are going to be used. Join's take up more memory to run, but with efficient indexing and proper data structure they will run just fine.

Anon

To really know, you need to pick a database and benchmark it with each basic configuration you're talking about. The sad truth is that some databases will be faster with a lot of smaller tables and lots of joins / views, while other databases will be faster with a few large tables and fewer joins.

Intelligent use of indexes can help alot on the multi-table join setup.

I'd favor the many tables with lots of joins, because I know my favorite database (postgresql 7.0.2) handles this stuff quickly and efficiently, but for other dbs, it's hard to say without testing it.