Hi,
I am new to db admin and would appreciate some help with a design issue.
We currently have 3 applications all with their own DB which all contain a product table. It is different in all 3 DB's and I need to replace all 3 with one enterprise wise table. This table has around 300 fields in it which when analysed fall into about 8 logical groups. Would it be better design practice to break this table up into 8 smaller tables with the product code as the key in each?

Like I said, I am very new to this and want to do it right.

Thanks for any help.

What sort of applications are they ?

If they are data maintanence sort (ie, which update details about a product) of applications, I would recommend a normalized structure, with as little data redundancy is possible ...

But, if the applications are Read-Ony, eg, datawarehouse type applications, denormalize them and optimize them to avoid joins.

It is not necessary that the physical structure of the table in each of the databases is the same, but they should have been dervied from the same logical model .. In other words, you should understand what the various attributes of the product are and how each of the attributes of the product relate to the other - the physical structure should be optimized to 'comply' with the nature of your application.

HTH

Sathyaram