Object Oriented Databases Very Large Cardinalities

Very Large Cardinalities: When the quantity of rows in tables grows to very large numbers, the numbers of rows in the join tables get even larger. "Modern" databases still have trouble with tables that approach even a billion records.

As cardinalities increase, fitting complex applications into the SQL model of joins and indexes becomes inefficient, uneconomical and ultimately unfeasible. Memory consuming indexes become numerous and very large. The amount of disk overhead required (known as data explosion) can grow to four times the size of the original data.

Many of these problems can be managed with a combination of limiting the system requirements and purchasing resources (faster servers, more disk and more memory). Not only is this expensive, it also doesn’t really solve the problem, because the problems will come become even more serious as the application wants to scale either in cardinalities or complexity.