Hi guys, I'm relatively new to databases and have been playing with SQL Server 2008 Express for some time. I want to build a database on stock prices and various other stock-related indicators across time. So basically it's going to have three dimensions: name of the stock, stock attributes, and time.
The user will be able to query for certain stock's performance on a particular attribute across a designated time period.Normally this would be a perfect job for OLAP (multidimensional database). However, due to financial constraint and other reasons
, I am not considering OLAP at the moment. With my limited knowledge on databases, I think I could achieve the above by using:
1) Relational database: if I need to track 1000 stocks, I will construct 1000 tables, with time and stock attributes on each stock table.
2) XML: I am relatively new to XML too, but it seems that with some clever XPath/XQuery coding, dumping all the data into one huge XML database is not a bad idea (or is it?), as long as data can be effectively retrieved.
In terms of speed/performance, maintenance convenience, and server-memory efficiency, which of the above two is a better choice? Or do I really need to migrate to using OLAP?
Sorry if this is a simple question, I am a total newbie regarding databases.
Thanks in advance!!
Traditional databases vs. XML vs. OLAP?
