OBT

There has been some discussion in the community about storing information in one large table. Essentially, this is a denormalized table with all the benefits and issues mentioned before with denormalization. Personally, I believe there can be huge benefits to the OBT approach, but with the increase in complexity as your needs grow, storing everything in one table can become very problematic. The more columns that grow in your table, the more likely you will have inserts in your table, and this can grow to the point where it’s impossible to maintain. An alternative approach might be to create data products once your OBT is becoming too much to handle. That data product would be a single table based on specific use cases that are pulled from a dimensional model. This allows for the best of both worlds and will negate all the negatives of each option. The only downside to this approach is you have increased complexity and storage.