Oracle representing hierarchy of data combinations

Question

I'm having an Oracle volume of data issue, which I think is being caused by a data representation problem. I have a hierarchy made from seven different lists, and need to store all the unique potential combinations of these elements. I need to store all the potential combinations, because I need to store additional information along with them.

Historically, we've been managing four lists, which came to a few thousand combinations. This was fine, but requirements have changed as they are wont to do, and now we are running seven lists. In my real environment, the lists store between 20 and 200 items. The total number of combinations for this now, incredibly, is about 350 billion.

As an example of what we're trying to represent with this, you could have a selection of lists like:

Colours:Red, Green, Blue

Shapes: Circle, Square, Triangle

Flavours: Peach, Banana, Raspberry

These would be stored as separate tables in Oracle like COLOURS, SHAPES, FLAVOURS, etc, and what we'd be doing is multiplying them all together (via a Cartesian join) to get an exploded table: This is what we're storing in Oracle at the moment.

COLOUR    SHAPE   FLAVOUR    DATA_1 DATA_2
Red       Circle  Peach      -- these hold additional information
Red       Circle  Banana
Red       Circle  Raspberry
Red       Square  Peach
Red       Square  Banana
...

and so on.

We've found we can't store billions of records within an Oracle table and have any operation performed upon them in a timely fashion. I've tried to think of different ways to store this information but my brain keeps jamming up on the number of combinations. Is there anything I can do to store the records differently? Bearing in mind they're all unique combinations, and we need to store data along with them.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

In the end, we chose to pivot the lists so that rather than having many millions of rows, we have a selection of tables with many columns. This isn't an ideal approach but it does have some advantages to others.

Answer 2

What about storing the data to non-relational database?

I would recommend MongoDB or Hypertable.