Question

I’m working on a project for a school where a particular module deals with attendance system. I’m using LAMP(PHP 5.2+ MYSQL 5+) stack for development. Now the school strength is around 1500 and total number of working days per year is around 250. Plus, I’ve to keep records for 5 years before it can be erased.

The table structure is

studentId varchar(12) 
date date
fn varchar(1) *forenoon*
af varchar(1) *afternoon*

If I simply use a single table, that means 1,875,000 records for a 5 year period. Now instead of such a humongous database, I considered making a table for each class (not section). So considering there are 12 classes, I’ll have 12 tables, which means an average of 1,55,000 records per table which is manageable.

Is this the right way to do it? Or are there any better ways?

Answer 1

What you are doing is called premature optimization. This is a common mistake.

You are better of getting your database structure as close to reality and in future if there becomes a need for optimization or speed improvement you can always do that.

From experience and looking at your example the single table solution looks fine.