Question

I am thinking about a DB Design Problem.

For example, I am designing this stackoverflow website where I have a list of Questions.

Each Question contains certain meta data that will probably not change. Each Question also contains certain data that will be consistently changing (Recently Viewed Date, Total Views…etc)

Would it be better to have a Main Table for reading the constant meta data and doing a join and also keeping the changing values in a different table?

OR

Would it be better to keep everything all in one table.

I am not sure if this is the case, but when updating, does the ROW lock?

Answer 1

When designing a database structure, it’s best to normalize first and change for performance after you’ve profiled and benchmarked your queries. Normalization aims to prevent data-duplication, increase integrity and define the correct relationships between your data.

Bear in mind that performing the join comes at a cost as well, so it’s hard to say if your idea would help any. Proper indexing with a normalized structure would be much more helpful.

And regarding row-level locks, that depends on the storage engine – some use row-level locking and some use table-locks.