Daniel > The most common scenarios: > - get a single marker from subset of individuals > - get a subset of markers from a single individual > - get a subset of markers from a subset of individuals
Sounds like this might define your database. Each individual has 500,000 markers, but maybe they are able to be grouped into 500 groupings of 1000 markers each. I'm kindof guessing what your application does, but I'm guessing the genes that define eye-colour might be in a different group to the genes that define liver placement. That way you could have 500 tables (in the one database file). You still need roughly the same amount of disk space (because quite simply that's how much data you have), but you may not need to be searching all of the data all of the time. Each table would contain the same subset of information for all individuals. Regards, Carl.