Hello!

I'm developing a table for visitors to our site which is getting somewhat monsterous. I'm a fairly novice database table design and I could use some advice.

Our visitors table initially started out small...

* user_id
* name
* login
* password

But then we wanted to record their contact information...

* address
* city
* state
* zip
* phone
* email

That's all happy. Next we wanted to store how they wanted to be contacted:

* contact_via_email
* contact_via_phone
* contact_via_alternate_phone
* contact_via_mail

Of course, next we want to see how they found our site..

* referred by a friend
* tv
* radio
* etc..


Then optional personal info...

* age
* job
* household size
* renter/buyer
* etc...


If I store all of the fields into a single database table, the table could get pretty huge. So... my question is... if you have a single thing in your database that contains potentially hundreds of attributes, how do you handle it?

Thanks!
- Bret

I in no way pretend to be an expert in normalization and you should definitely normalize as much as is reasonable. Sounds like you're fairly new at it so I suggest http://databases.about.com/od/specif...malization.htm as a starting point. maybe shoot for level 2.

You'll probably have plenty of time though to get it right. I started a tiny database to track 10 stats for 15 people on a monthly basis. I was assured that that's all we were tracking so I just threw it together. It's now 18 stats on 1300 people being updated daily. 4 months later I'm starting to lag if I get many people connecting. 1 person connecting I can still find just about anything in less than 1 sec using a desktop computer.

So...
Start by seperating out the things that lots of people will be using.
user_ID, Login, Password
Not sure if Login is unique? If it is, then you could use it as user_ID?

Next you'll probably want to get contact information out of the way. Address in 1 table (you probably won't have 100's of people at the same address but you can normalize for that if you want also). tie it with user_id as a foreign key. Don't forget to create a primary key!

optional data you probably won't use much? Unless you're selling it as a primary business.

Basically i'd just start by seperating out into 3 tables. Play with it. See if you're entering the same information repeatedly. then sort it out again.

in a single table

there's no problem in having a table with lots of columns

all database engines are capable of handling this

stop worrying