Do VIEWS use more resources?

[bugboy]

Do views duplicate any data?

I have a large DB and am thinking of creating VIEWS for users that contain only the info they have access too so that they aren't querying the full DB every time. If i do this I'm wondering if the VIEWS will effectively multiply the required disk space and/or memory by the number of users logged in?

My users will be doing multiple sub searches within results... ie. each subsequent query's results will be a subset of the previous results.. are VIEWs good for this?

[pbmods]

Heya, bugboy.

Views, in my opinion, aren't ready for primetime yet. They're not indexable, and the underlying query still has to be executed every time the data changes.

My advice would be to partition your table into smaller tables. It may require extra work on the PHP side, but it will help keep your table data manageable.

[bugboy]

Thanks!

Would i classify my info into different categories (tables) so that i would only have to query one of them.. by somehow predetermining which table to search?

[pbmods]

Heya, bugboy.

Now that's the real trick, isn't it?

What kind of data would you be partitioning?

[bugboy]

It's like a big dictionary... nothing new.. i have a table with a tens of millions of words 'w', and a table that will have a few hundred million definitions 'd'.. nothing big haha. Each definition is very short so theres not a huge amount to disk space required.... relatively.

The biggest problem is the foreign key table 's'.. i calculate that the relationships between the words and definitions will be in the billions. Maybe it's to ambitious for a normal database structure... but then people are doing things on this scale.

I don't need it to be this big right away... i'm thinking down the road, i don't want to get stuck with bad architecture and a slow expensive query system. If i were to build it simple now but scalable later that would be perfect. My goal is to understand how the architecture should change with growth so i don't get boxed in.

Thanks a billion! ...or four