Hello everybody!

I got green lights for a new project and now I'm pondering with
different approaches for my database schema.

The problem domain is the following:

1) We want to store the measurement output of any number of sensors.

2) Each measurement has to include the information when it was
measured and when it was stored.

3) A measurement could produce multiple data sets, for example a tilt
meter could produce one result per 10 meters of a tunnel at a time.

4) Each type of sensor provides different measurement data (eg, X, Y,
H, temperature, tilt, ...), so we can not assume a common data
structure.

5) We think that there will be a maximum of 10 sensor types.

6) Writing data doesn't have to be blazingly fast, but it should be
possible to write about 40 sets of data per second

7) The database could collect data for a period of over 10 years, so
there is a chance that it has to master data of well over 500GB


The idea most tempting for me is the relational database way:

TABLE SensorType (Contains the different types of sensors with all
important information)
TABLE SensorA (Inventory of sensors of type A)
TABLE MeasurementSensorA (All measurements of all sensors of type A)
TABLE SensorB
TABLE MeasurementSensorB
...

So I would create tables 2 & 3 for every type of sensor.
But what happens if I want to aggregate the output of different sensor
types for reporting purposes?
Will the user have to wait long for his/her results, beacuse of all
the Joins that will have to be performed?

Now there are other possible approaches.
What about XML data in Microsoft SQL Server? Would it be better to
have only one Measurement table and save the output of a measurement
in XML format?
Or what about CouchDB, MongoDB, RavenDB,... As I don't know which data
I will have to store in the future, this also seems to be a viable
alternative.

Do you have any suggestions? How would you design it?

Thanks a lot!
Sebastian

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