We have a database that stores the process/history of particular machines. What I mean by that is that we have "started", "updating", "shutdown", and so on for all the computers in the company.
The requirement is to have the history available in the right order. Simple enough. My approach was to have a simple database table like this:
counter | machine | time | process | ... 1 | PC1 | ... | started 2 | PC2 | ... | updating 1 | PC1 | ... | updating
The query will be very simple because I can simply sort by the counter.
My colleagues suggested a very different approach. My gut feeling says it is wrong but I don't have enough arguments against it. Can you help define what is wrong with it?
Instead of using multiple rows for the process of a machine, they want to write them sequentlly into the same field. Same goes for the time field. Their main arguement is that we save storage
counter | machine | time | process | ... 1 | PC1 | ... ... ... | started updating shutdown 2 | PC2 | ... ... ... | started updating