>
>Is a recursive design acceptable? Or will I run into problems at some
>time. Nations will be up to 200 records, clubs maybe about
>50'000-100'000 records, persons can be up to a million and results
>will be several millions.
>
>cu Christian

I don't think you need a recursive design. You will only get the full
result set in one instance - and that instance is when you select
everything from all tables. More likely, you will want to know, for
example, the persona for a particular club; or how people did in a specific
match; or you will want the ranking of people according to the results.

In each case, you will want a subset of the entire database. This is what
DBMS's do, and do well. The largest database I have ever used contained 28
million records in its' "persons" table. Each person could have one or many
addresses. Each person owed money to a specific company, and each company
was a subsidiary of a specific client of ours. Each person made one or many
payments on an account. (The application was a debt collecting application)
We wrote it on IB 4.2, and later upgraded to IB 5.0, and it worked very
very well.

The largest IB database I have ever heard of was a 300 GB database used by
the Health and Racquet group of Health Clubs in South Africa. It held very
similar data to yours, and it worked very very well indeed, even on older
versions of Interbase.

So I would make separate tables (as you outline) and do it that way, rather
than trying to do it recursively.

Regards

Tim



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