8.3.3. Using Foreign Keys

If a table has many columns, and you query many different combinations of columns, it might be efficient to split the less-frequently used data into separate tables with a few columns each, and relate them back to the main table by duplicating the numeric ID column from the main table. That way, each small table can have a primary key for fast lookups of its data, and you can query just the set of columns that you need using a join operation. Depending on how the data is distributed, the queries might perform less I/O and take up less cache memory because the relevant columns are packed together on disk. (To maximize performance, queries try to read as few data blocks as possible from disk; tables with only a few columns can fit more rows in each data block.)