Question

Scenario 1

I have one table lets say “member”. In that table “member” i have 7 fields ( memid,login_name,password,age,city,phone,country ). In my table i have 10K records.i need to fetch one record . so i’m using the query like this

mysql_query("select * from member where memid=999");

Scenario 2

I have the same table called “member” but i’m splitting the table like this member and member_txt .So in my member_txt table i have memid,age,phone,city,country )and in my member table i have memid,login_name,password .

Which is the best scenario to fetch the data quickly? Either going to single table or split the table into two with reference?

Note: I need to fetch the particular data in PHP and MYSQL. Please let me know which is best method to follow.
we have 10K records

Answer 1

For your own health, use the single table approach.

As long as you are using a primary key for memid, things are going to be lightning fast. This is because PRIMARY KEY automatically assigns an index, which basically tells the exact location for the data and eliminates the need to go through data that it would otherwise do.

From http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-indexes.html

Indexes are used to find rows with specific column values quickly.
Without an index, MySQL must begin with the first row and then read
through the entire table to find the relevant rows. The larger the
table, the more this costs. If the table has an index for the columns
in question, MySQL can quickly determine the position to seek to in
the middle of the data file without having to look at all the data. If
a table has 1,000 rows, this is at least 100 times faster than reading
sequentially. If you need to access most of the rows, it is faster to
read sequentially, because this minimizes disk seeks.

Your second approach only makes your system more complex, and provides no benefits.

Use the scenario 1.