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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T07:05:01+00:00

I have a table in my MySQL ( InnoDB ) full with user items.

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I have a table in my MySQL (InnoDB) full with user items. Basically each row has a user_id field and other item properties like color. Then there is one more field called a link which holds the id of some other user’s item, but in most cases (90 %) there is no item linked and thus the field is set to NULL.

I was wondering would it be more efficient to make a new table which would hold the link information than having 90 % of 6 million rows to have the field link set to NULL?

I’m using Hibernate.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, it would be more efficient and more normalized. Whenever I see a table with lots of nulls like this, I consider it a candidate for normalization. In this example, you could remove that column from the table entirely and it would be much more cleaner and easier to maintain. You would just create a junction table with a two user_ids that are foreign keys on the user items table.

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