Hi I'm creating an application that have an fixed length alphanumeric key and each key has (currently) up to 5 fixed length alphanumeric variables. I was wondering which of the designs would be faster considering that I could have about million keys... The first design is the obvious one. create one table with ID and "KEYNAME", and a second table which uses the ID of the first table as foreign key to list values. The second design is to use one table with the columns: "key", "value1", "value2", etc... Since it's highly unlikely that we'll ever change the number of values, I'm ready to consider this option if it proves to be much faster then the first design. (although I do prefer the first design if the speed improvements is minor). Any ideas? Thanks in advance -- Haim
