Database design for school attendance system

Question

I\'m working on a project for a school where a particular module deals with attendance system. I\'m using LAMP(PHP 5.2+ MYSQL 5+) stack for development. Now the school stren

Answer 1

I would suggest that there is no need to split this table up. If you create appropriate indexes for any selective queries you may need to perform, the system should be able to find the required rows very quickly. Even for analytic queries that involve all rows, 2 million such records should only require a second or two to scan, which I imagine would not present a great problem.

MySQL now also supports partitioning of data as an optional feature. Partitioning is similar to your proposal to split the table up, but it is done at the physical level, so it isn't visible to users or developers using your schema. This may be a useful approach if you find that a single-table implementation is still too slow. This document provides an overview of partitioning in MySQL 5.4.