I understand that the question needs a lot of context to be answered properly but I was wondering if, as a general principle, was it better to have a small (10-100 bytes) or big (say >1k) average row size. If I know that right the physical storage is hit every time a new page is required so, I thought, having a small average row size means lower disk access time, ergo better performance on SELECTs. Is that right? And what about INSERT/DELETE/UPDATEs? I don't have enough knowledge of how a DBMS does its job under the curtain and I haven't found much information around so I thought to ask here. Thanks in advance.