Old, Good Database Design
I&#x27;m wondering what you guys think about columnar databases and wide tables.<p>We use Vertica and from senior colleagues and even Vertica developers I got the impression that big wide tables are good because it eliminates the needs of join. Thus we don&#x27;t use star schema and just wide tables.<p>However I think data modelling is also about embedding proper business logic and it would be a lot more confusing if two unrelated columns are stuffed in the same table.<p>For example let&#x27;s say my event based game has a base for each player and he can do a lot of things in his base. If we use a wide table then we wilk see columns related to factory building side by side with pig feeding, and because each small feature has some unique columns, a lot of those columns are NULL simply because this event json doesn&#x27;t even have th fields.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if we should use Vertica for a transactional type table and then use say sql server for dwh and build more traditional data modelling. But this could be awfully wrong maybe...