At 03/08/2002 04:56 PM (Friday), Xavier Solé wrote:

>Well, this database will have data coming from DNA microarray experiments. I
>don't know if you have heard something about them. I just will tell you that
>one single experiment generates 10000 rows of raw data. Imagine I want to get
>the raw data of (just) 10 experiments to make some kind of statistical
>analysis with them, this generates the 100000 rows I explained befored. The
>field of Computational Biology is one of the most challenging ones, and even
>more if we talk about bilogical databases, which must be able to store
>enormous amount of data.... and now I begin to face this challenge!!

If one experiment generates that much data and if you usually need to deal
with all the data from one experiment as a single group of data, then
rather than store 10,000 rows I would consider storing the whole collection
of data into one BLOB field in one record for each experiment.

Also, consider using array fields. (I have never used them with
Interbase/Firebird but I have done lots of work with multi-dimensional
datasets in a past life.)