On 2/17/08, Maxim Khitrov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The simplest design would be to create two tables, one for nodes > another for edges, and create a column for every possible property. > This, however, is huge waste of space, since there will not be a > single node or edge that will make use of all the defined properties. > There may be hundreds of properties, but each node may use ten on > average. That's the question - how do you represent this information > in the database in a space-efficient manner. We still have to be able > to search for specific nodes given their properties. For example – > find all the nodes located within radius z of coordinate x,y. PostGIS > will handle the special bit, but there has to be an efficient way of > accessing this information/property for each node that has it.
If you have a lot of columns but most of them are NULL for a given record, the tuple size won't actually be that big. PG stores a bitmap in each tuple telling which columns are NULL, and then only stores the non-NULL column vales. So this approach may end up being reasonably efficient for you. -Doug ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
