How to Design an Efficient Database for a Scalable Survey System?

Building an efficient and scalable survey system database

Designing an efficient database structure is critical to building a flexible, scalable, and high-performance data collection survey system. One of the key decisions is how the questions and answers are organized in the database.

A common approach is to create a wide table with a column for each possible answer. However, this approach can become unmanageable as the number of questions and answer options increases. A more flexible and scalable solution is to separate the questions and answers into two tables.

1. Question form:

• This table stores relevant information about each question in the survey, including:
  • QuestionID (question ID)
  • SurveyID (associated key associated with a specific survey)
  • QuestionType (question type, e.g. text field, multiple choice question)
  • Question (actual question text)

2. Answer sheet:

• This table stores the individual answers provided by participants and associates them with related questions:
  • AnswerID (answer ID)
  • UserID (associated key associated with the participant)
  • QuestionID (associated key related to a specific question)
  • Answer (answer text)

This design allows questions and answers to be easily added or modified without extensive table refactoring. Additionally, since only one answer is stored per row, it reduces the size of the answer table, thereby improving performance for large surveys.

By adopting this model, survey systems can adapt to a variety of question types, manage multiple surveys, and efficiently store and retrieve survey responses.

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