Question

I am having a hard time trying to figure out when to use a 1-to-1 relationship in db design or if it is ever necessary.

If you can select only the columns you need in a query is there ever a point to break up a table into 1-to-1 relationships. I guess updating a large table has more impact on performance than a smaller table and I’m sure it depends on how heavily the table is used for certain operations (read/ writes)

So when designing a database schema how do you factor in 1-to-1 relationships? What criteria do you use to determine if you need one, and what are the benefits over not using one?

Answer 1

From the logical standpoint, a 1:1 relationship should always be merged into a single table.

On the other hand, there may be physical considerations for such "vertical partitioning" or "row splitting", especially if you know you’ll access some columns more frequently or in different pattern than the others, for example:

• You might want to cluster or partition the two "endpoint" tables of a 1:1 relationship differently.
• If your DBMS allows it, you might want to put them on different physical disks (e.g. more performance-critical on an SSD and the other on a cheap HDD).
• You have measured the effect on caching and you want to make sure the "hot" columns are kept in cache, without "cold" columns "polluting" it.
• You need a concurrency behavior (such as locking) that is "narrower" than the whole row. This is highly DBMS-specific.
• You need different security on different columns, but your DBMS does not support column-level permissions.
• Triggers are typically table-specific. While you can theoretically have just one table and have the trigger ignore the "wrong half" of the row, some databases may impose additional limits on what a trigger can and cannot do. For example, Oracle doesn’t let you modify the so called "mutating" table from a row-level trigger – by having separate tables, only one of them may be mutating so you can still modify the other from your trigger (but there are other ways to work-around that).

Databases are very good at manipulating the data, so I wouldn’t split the table just for the update performance, unless you have performed the actual benchmarks on representative amounts of data and concluded the performance difference is actually there and significant enough (e.g. to offset the increased need for JOINing).

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On the other hand, if you are talking about "1:0 or 1" (and not a true 1:1), this is a different question entirely, deserving a different answer…

See also: When I should use one to one relationship?