Ruby on Rails

On 3 January 2011 01:10, Marnen Laibow-Koser <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
> David Zhu wrote in post #971909:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have a user table that stores their username, email address, and
>> password. (along with salt, etc)
>>
>> However, now I want to have more complex information associated with
>> each user (address, etc). I'm no DBA expert, so in terms of
>> performance, which is better:
>>
>> - A user table that has all the fields in it (Username, Email,
>> password, country, state, zipcode, etc)
>> - A user table that only has username/password/email, that is
>> connected via a foreign key to another table that stores all the other
>> fields.
>>
>> Which is better? And why?
>
> The first will be slightly better in terms of performance, because
> you're not joining tables.  But if your tables are properly indexed, the
> join should have a negligible effect on performance.
>
> However, I don't see why you'd use the second approach.  It's more
> complex for no particular gain.

The one time you might want to keep addresses, for example, in a
separate table, would be if your app had the concept of multiple users
at the same address. You might have family membership of a club for
example. In this case it would be a bad idea to save the same address
a number of times for each member of the family.

Colin

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group.
To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.