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Possible Duplicate:
Storing vs calculating aggregate values
Say I have a table full of photos that each have an albumId that is a foreign key to an album table. To get the amount of photos in each album, I could simply do a Count() on the photo table where the albumId = the id from the album table. However, to accomplish this same task, I could keep a photoCount column in the album table. Is it worth keeping that extra column in the album table instead of using the Count() function?
You can also consider materialized views (not all RDMS support this feature though)
It depends on your application. If you use the number of your photos a lot, its better to keep the count so you don't have to run a query every time. But another things is if you add new photos with a high frequency, by storing the number of photos, you will have to update it every time.
