Horizontal Database and Vertical Database

Question

Hello, i am working on social networking site having family tree wit Gedcom compliance. we need to finilize that we should use horizontal database or vertical database structure for User profiles. so, i would like to know if anybody can answer that. when to use horizontal database and when to use verticle database.

i found some answers like for shopping sites where fields are not decided, verticle database should be used. but i am confused that in family site. i should use verticle or horizontal.

Answer 1

I assume you use a relational database like Mysql, Ms sql, Sqlite, Postgresql or Oracle for storage?

Gedcom is a standard for information exchange so you know how many columns you will have. Maybe the standard is extended with new properties in the future but it probably wont be a lot of new properties. You can easily extend a table with a few new columns.

I would use a 'horizontal' table and not a entity-attribyte-value-system (vertical table). Vertical table systems tend to be slow. They can't be properly indexed and confuse the query optimizer.

It becomes a different story when your users can define new properties in their profiles like eye colo(u)r or favourite colo(u)r themselves. How flexible do you want those profiles to be?