Re: How many fields in a table are too many

On Thursday 26 June 2003 12:44 am, btober(at)seaworthysys(dot)com wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 03:17:12AM -0400, btober(at)seaworthysys(dot)com
> >
> > wrote:
> >> > I have a table with 13 fields. Is that
> >> > too many fields for one table.
> >> > Mark
> >>
> >> Thirteen? No way. I've got you beat with 21:
> >
> > Pfft! Is *that* all? I've got a table with 116 fields.
>
> I *knew* a number of these responses would be forthcoming... :)
>

Of course they would. :)

As long as we are playing "who's is biggest", I have one with 900+
attributes (normalized) but there is a big warning - if you have a
query that returns hundreds of columns it will be very, very slow.
Slow as in tens of seconds to do a "select * from fattable" when
fattable has <1000 records.

Tom Lane looked at the profile data I sent and had the issue added to
the TODO list some time back. Check the archives for "Terrible
performance on wide selects" if you are interested. I believe the
problem is still on the TODO list under the category of "caching".

Cheers,
Steve