Question

I am using PHP and MySQL, i am just wondering which route would be better for performance, The database is going to be constantly growing, but at a relatively slow rate, but for each employee i have to store a decent amount of information, ex:

id
name
address
phone
email
coworkers
pay_rate
notes
tasks
completed_tasks

so I am wondering which is better for my database set-up?

should i create a new table for each employee, or should i just create each table link the information accordingly with an id number.

Answer 1

These are should be the tables

EMPLOYEES
  id
  name
  address
  phone
  email
  pay_rate
COWORKERS (this is a link table, tells relationship among employees)
  EMPLOYEE.ID (FK)
  EMPLOYEE.ID (FK)
NOTES
  notes_id
  notes
  EMPLOYEE.id (FK)
TASKS
  task_id
  task-details
  completed (int or bool)
  EMPLOYEE.id (FK)

Do not create new table for each employee. Not recommended.. searches, filtering will be difficult. You should organize data keeping in mind how they are interrelated in terms of mapping e.g. employee set is mapped to notes set in one to many manner.

Also, you should not think too much about what if db starts overflowing. If that time comes, you must be having mutiple billions of rows. And then you may think of a technique to arrange data.