Spoiler warning to Kayot : I'm French
My question to you Kayot is : what is the problem with having a "big" table ? (I put big in quotes because 25 MB is hardly huge, my customers often have Oracle databases with tablespaces in the GB range, and that is only meta-data, not blobs). To put it another way, what kind of processing are you doing that makes the total table size matter ? The Emu loads the items DB in totality in memory, it only takes a few seconds and is a few 10s of MB in memory size. Close to nothing.
I like being able to query items based on individual fields, though I agree some fields are kinda crazy (the augment fields for example, they are a pain to interpret) and could use some rationalizing. The problem there is it seems the items table is derived directly from some "external dump", the 13-th Floor (I may be off there, I have no real idea how all that is extracted, but that was my understanding).
What the hell are you doing with the full item table dump