Greetings,
One of my favorite uses of these forums is to discuss design decisions. First of all explaining what I'm trying to do is a a useful exercise plus there's susally a good discussion of the trade offss.
I couldn't decide which froum this went in,
JDBC,
Servlets or here. So Since this forum has the words General in the name here goes.
My problem
I've been working for about 18 months on an apache/tomcat/servlet based enterprise app that is a data visualization tool into a a large database (5PB) of scientific data distributed over multiple sites around the world. I've got most of the basic tools in place that the user's need and have shifted the development work to hardening and addressing administrator's needs.
Right now I have too many tables, options and explanatory text strings embedded in the code. It was a conscious decision to delay generalizing that part until the user functionality matures. Whether that was wise or not is not the debate I'm looking for.
My question
So the project underway is to move appropriate arrays and tables into the program's mysql database (as oppesed to the exteral scientific data storage) and create pages to create, delete, and edit these things.
The question is do we create a lot of specialized tables. I envision 10, 20 maybe 50. They will be small but they will be formatted close to the
Java fields and objects they populate.
Or should we limit the number of tables and make an effort to serialize these data structures into a general form in the table.
Formatted text will have a separate table for help balloons and error messages. The total rows in these tables may hit a thousand over the life of the project.
My dillema
I just can't see a good reason to go one way or the other. I can't see a big difference in performance or development time.
I'm looking for an opinion or a a discussion on how people have implemented this sort of thing.
Thanks in advance,
Joe