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I am curious if it is considered a bad practice to use a unique table to store values asigned to a unique field that is shared between several webforms.

The site with webforms will carry thousands or hundred of concurrent visitors, I want to know performance implications of this practice.

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  • Perhaps the Drupal SE site would be more appropriate for this question. You are asking more about Drupal best practices than MySQL, no?
    – Nick Chammas
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 22:21
  • thanks, I come from Drupal SE, a related question was not answered, but not is my question. I am curious about this practice from a general Mysql perspective/approach (if is possible). this is the question in [Drupal SE site] (drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/11655/…) if is useful.
    – MWt
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 22:32
  • Update: I removed the information related with a CMS because I want a general mysql perspective, not a isolated perspective regarding an only CMS. The particular behavior of the CMS bring me the idea of ask my general question, but the question is not related with the CMS.
    – MWt
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 14:52

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I think that what you're really asking is twofold:

Is it general practice to make a table with a few custom fields that are accessed by many pages in the app specifically for those few custom fields on many pages.

While it's unusual, this is rather part of the whole intent of having databases in the first place. A central location to store data that can be retrieved from consistently and easily, and that is abstracted from the design of the site.

Is it going to cause performance issues to have [many of these tables|tables with such small sets of data]?

No, not at all. Database engine designers know that these things will happen, and they're usually smarter than you or I. We can discuss this more if you like, by discussing the mechanics of database engine design, but it should be sufficient to say that "the smart guys thought of all this already".

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  • thanks a lot for your answer, I agree, I think that Database engine designers have a good criteria to make this kind of design decisions. Also, I made a memory consuption test and indeed I not see big different performance that other queries that address to an unique table. I will review other kind of test to see more feedback about performance
    – MWt
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 14:59

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