将表与可伸缩性相关联的最佳方法是什么

Question

Using MySQL, I am implementing the Party pattern, where parties maybe people or organisations. A party may also be a customer, supplier etc etc.

What is the best way to relate this?

Customer, Supplier, etc Tables with 1:1 to the Party table.

OR

PartyType Table with unique rows inc Customer, Supplier etc that relates 1:1 in the Party table.

I am trying to working out what is better for scaling up to possible large number of Party records.

eg:

Select * From Suppliers Inner Join Party …

OR

Select * From Party Where PartyType = "supplier"

I have initial thoughts, but not sure if they are valid:

Suppliers will hold less records to search on so maybe thats optimal, But then is MySQL clever enough to HOP through large Party table only picking up PartyType = 'Suppliers.

Does it even matter?

Answer 1

As always if you are concerned about performance: go test it! And if the performance is good in either case, take the better design in regard of normalisation and such.

But to get to you question, MySQL (as any other relevant DB System) is very efficient in querying big tables for information. I think option A works best. You need an index on the referenced column of the party, but since it is quite likely that this is the primary key, you have good chances that this design works good out of the box.