Mysql – DB Design – 1 column for each dataset OR dataset_name AND dataset_value

coincidently I am also looking into one of the client support where we designed key-value pair structure for flexibility and currently table is over 1.5B rows and ETL is way too slow. well there are lot of other things in my case but have you thought about that design. you will have one row with all 200 columns present value, that row will convert in to 200 rows in Key-Value pair design. you will gain space advantage with this design depending on for a given AssetID and Date how many rows has actually all 200 f1 to f200 values present? if you say even 30% od columns have NULL value than that is your space saving. because in key-value pair design if value id NULL that row doesn't need to be in table. but in existing column structure design even NULL takes space.(I am not 100% sure but if you have more that 30 columns NULL in table then NULL take 4bytes). if you see this design and assume that all 35M rows has values in all 200 columns then you current db will become 200*35M=700M rows in table right away. but it will not be much high in table space what you had with all columns in single table as we are just Transposing the Columns in to row. in this transpose operation actually we will not have rows where the values are NULL. so you can actually run query against this table and see how many nulls are there and estimate you target table size before you actually implement it.

second advantage is read performance. as you mentioned that new way of querying the data is any combination this f1 to f200 column in where clause. with key value pair design f1 to f200 are present in one column lets say "FildName" and their values are present in second column lets say "FieldValue". you can have CLUSTERED index on both columns. your query will be UNION of those Selects.

WHERE (FiledName = 'f1' and FieldValue BETWEEN 5 AND 6)

UNION

(FiledName = 'f2' and FieldValue BETWEEN 8 AND 10)

etc.....

I will give you some performance numbers form actual prod server. we have 75 price columns for each security TICKER.

Treat the various processes as sub-types. There will then be entity process_base, which contains all the common attributes, process1, process2, process2a etc. for the process-specific attributes.

Implement these as a table each. A view which combines them all together may simplify usage

create view process_all as
select <whatever>
from process_base
inner join process1 <etc>

union all

select <whatever>
from process_base
inner join process2 <etc>
...

This way you minimise the NULL columns (if that is desirable to you) but maintain the unity of "process" as a single idea.