Newbie trying to figure out the best way to design a Postgres db for the following use case scenario.
There is an Account table for the business customers and there is a contacts table with a column relationship.
account.pk_id, ….
contacts.pk_id, contacts.fk_accountid …
Thousands of different businesses in the Accounts table will be storing millions of contacts each in the Contacts table.
Each contact record will over time belong to between 1 and 100 different categories, lists and products.
If I use a classic sql master/child relationship I potentially end up with millions and millions of rows in tables such as contacts_categories, contacts_lists and contacts_products which would reference from Categories, Lists & Products tables.
Alternatively, I could store the related keys ( uuid’s) for categories, lists and products in 3 character varying arrays[] columns in the contact record row. This would eliminate the need for the contacts_categories, contacts_lists and contacts_products tables that would be quite large.
With tools like Select unnest, array_append() and the array index options it seems like a smart solution but am curious to know if it is better to stick to normalized relations and more tables and row counts for performance and / or storage memory / cost.
Anybody tried this before ?
