Big table, or many smaller ones

[aleX_hill]

Hi,

 

I am reasonably new to using MySQL. I am looking at designing a site where each user lists a lot of items (similar to a gift registry). Is it normal practice to make one big table (ie "gifts") with the user (id) as a field, or create a new table for each user. What is the best thing to do, assuming that I use one table, when this table becomes to big?

 

Thanks in advance,

Alex

[Hooker]

It really depends on how many fields you have in your table, can you show us the structure?

 

Idealy if your going to go into the hundreds of thousands - millions of records you should idealy be looking to split your table where nessisary.

[fenway]

Don't worry about denormalizing your tables until much later.