I am planning to create a website using ASP.NET and SQL Server. However, my plan for the database design leaves me wondering if there is a better way.
The website will serve as a repository of information for various users. I figure I would have two databases, a Membership and Profile database.
The profile database would contain user data for all users, where each user may have ~20 tables. I would create the tables when the user account is created and generate a key used to name the tables. The tables are not directly related.
For Example a set of tables for two different users could look like:
User1 Tables - TransactionTable_Key1, AssetTable_Key1, ResearchTable_Key1 ....;
User2 Tables - TransactionTable_Key2, AssetTable_Key2, ResearchTable_Key2 ....;
The Key1, Key2 etc.. values would be retrieved based on the MembershipID data when the account was created. This could result in a very large number of tables over time. I’m not sure if this will limit scalability by setting up the database in this way. Any recommendations?
Edit: I should mention that some of these tables would contain 20k+ rows.
You definitely don’t want to create a set of tables for each user, and you would want these only in one database. Even with SQL Server 2008’s large capacity for tables (note really total objects in database), it would quickly become unmanageable. Your best bet is to use 20 tables, and separate them via a column into user areas. You might consider partitioning the tables by this user value, but that should be tested for performance reasons too.