Question

I am making a site in django [mysql] that will have to be scalable, so my question is what is better for multiple users with same kind of data

have a db per user , or have one big monolithic db?

Please advice of the design pattern preferred for this?

thanks!

Answer 1

Normally, You use a single database for multiple users with the same table schema, unless your requirement makes you create multiple DBs. Especially, if you have the same kind of data for each user, you must handle access rights and other things in your application side, not in your database side.

Django hava a nice User authentication/authorization system that lets you define permissions and lets you control user access rights (creating a new record, updating an existing one and deleting one) for each type of data that is represented by a table in your system. Also you can define custom permissions to control access rigts as you wish.