I’m new to databases, and this question has to do with how smart I can expect databases to be. Here by “databases” I mean “something like” MySQL or H2 (I actually have no idea if these two are similar, just that they are popular). I’m actually using ScalaQuery, so it abstracts away from the underlying database.
Suppose I have a table with entries of type (String, Int), with lots of redundancy in the String entries. So my table might look like:
(Adam, 18)
(Adam, 24)
(Adam, 34)
… continued …
(Adam, 3492)
(Bethany, 4)
(Bethany, 45)
… continued …
(Bethany, 2842)
If I store this table with H2, is it going to be smart enough to realize “Adam” and “Bethany” are repeated lots of times, and can be replaced with enumerations pointing to lookup tables? Or is it going to waste lots of storage?
Related: If H2 is smart in this respect with strings, is it also smart in the same way with doubles? In my probably brain-dead initial table, I happen to have lots of repeated double fields.
Thanks!
The database engine is not built to recognize redundancies in data and fix them. That is the task of the designer / developer.