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Does anyone here remember the equation for database efficiency? I know it's something like Efficiency = Data / Time or something like that.

Depends what action your talking about it really?

Well for a database system where the user is searching the database for data...

It's a project for school, we're doing expert systems and I want to throw in the database efficiency equation to justify several (seemingly pointless) parts of the system's design.

Then yeah Search Efficiency can be expressed as such. If you are testing numerous algorithms against each other i would use a system where by all data in the system is searched for and average times per search are correlated.

Efficiency is in the eye of the beholder. Or: Database efficiency is whatever the marketing department claims it to be.

Perhaps, for a given application, absolute search-time is crucial. Another app might require that search time scales well for huge databases. Another app might require that search time scales well for concurrency. Another app might require all three.

And that is not taking into account storage efficiency, reliability etc...