[SOLVED] Which is faster

[Lodius2000]

Which do you think (or do you know) is faster

 

I am possibly taking up part of a project. It is to create a blog system for a larger website geared at having thousands of members, each with a blog among other things

 

i am thinking of having all blog entries in one table like this, in its most basic form

 

TABLE entries

FIELDS

id

title

entry_body

username

 

then we assemble each users blog from this query

 

SELECT (id, title, entry_body) FROM entries WHERE username = $username

 

or should I make a new table for each user

 

TABLE $username_entries

FIELDS

id

title

entry_body

 

SELECT * FROM $username_entries

//SELECT statements might not always use * so take that in account of your speed estimate

 

yes i know SELECT * statements are really fast, but i am thinking about the massive numbers of tables that mysql has to sift through before it even finds the correct one

 

so my question is, is it faster to have thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of entries in one table and use a WHERE clause, or is it faster to select one table from thousands and dump its contents?

 

I just wanna know because I dont wanna necessarily clutter the database with oodles of tables unless there is a serious speed bonus

 

thanks

[phparray]

Normalize your tables.  Do not create tables with duplicate structures as in creating a table for each user. This will bloat your database for sure. 

[Mchl]

There's nothing wrong in having very long tables. MySQL copes very well with that. Having one table per user will drive you mad.

[Lodius2000]

to both of you... thanks, that reaffirms me in the direction i was leaning, I didnt want to have more tables than needed just wanted to make sure a table with thousands of records wouldnt slow me down too much...

 

solved

[Mchl]

Make sure you use good indexes, and you should be fine.