Thread: Postgres Design
I have hundreds of different survey files in a customized database. I would like to convert them to postgres. My question is should I create one database for all the surveys or should I limit the number of surveys to a database. for example create a different database for each survey year, or by research company ?
On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 02:27:32PM -0500, Morris N. Grajower wrote: > I have hundreds of different survey files in a customized database. > I would like to convert them to postgres. > My question is should I create one database for all the surveys or > should I limit the number of surveys to a database. > for example create a different database for each survey year, or by > research company ? Might you ever need to issue a query that joins multiple surveys? If so then it would make sense to put them in the same database; if you want to group some surveys together then you could use schemas. Also think about whether you want to have separate tables or schemas for individual years or research companies, or whether you might be able to use a table with columns like "year" and "research_company_id" (or maybe a combination of both approaches). Without knowing more about your data it's hard to recommend a good way to organize it. -- Michael Fuhr http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/
Speaking in a general sense, it's almost never a good idea to split something across databases by an arbitrary boundary such as year. It's also not a good idea to split things into multiple databases across logical boundaries unless there's a compelling reason to do so. On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 02:27:32PM -0500, Morris N. Grajower wrote: > I have hundreds of different survey files in a customized database. > I would like to convert them to postgres. > My question is should I create one database for all the surveys or > should I limit the number of surveys to a database. > for example create a different database for each survey year, or by > research company ? > > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate > subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your > message can get through to the mailing list cleanly > -- Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel@decibel.org Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 Windows: "Where do you want to go today?" Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"