I am creating a application that requires to store multiple attributes, and it will look up DB while running (this means multiple DB lookups). This App. should have low overhead hence, I need your suggestion whether to create multiple columns in single table or multiple tables with minimum columns.
A:
Having multiple tables doesn't really add any overhead to your app, and if any, it's really dwarfed by the benefits you get from a relational database design point of view and good organization of data.
Also, consider what kind of data you want to store, for example if you're storing Customers and their Orders, it wouldn't make sense to have all this info in one table, or you could but it would be denormalized and in this case you'd be doing extra work to organize the data in code and adding unnecessary overhead and storage use.
Ricardo Villamil
2010-06-18 17:13:01