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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-14T01:59:20+00:00

I have a scenario wherein I have users uploading their custom preferences to the

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I have a scenario wherein I have users uploading their custom preferences to the conversion being done by our utility. So, the problem we are facing is

should we keep these custom mappings in one table with an extra column of UID or maybe GUID
,

or

should we create tables on the fly for every user that registers with us and provide him/her a separate table for their custom mappings altogether?

We’re more inclined to having just an extra column and one table for the custom mappings, but does the redundant data in that one column have any effect on performance? On the other hand, logic dictates us to normalize our tables and have separate tables. I’m rather confused as to what to do.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Common practice is to use a single table with a user id. If there are commonly reused preferences, you can instead refactor these out into a separate table and reference them in one go, but that is up to you.

    Why is the creating one table per user a bad idea? Well, I don’t think you want one million tables in your database if you end up with one million users. Doing it this way will also guarantee your queries will be unwieldy at best, often slower than they ought to be, and often dynamically generated and EXECed – usually a last resort option and not necessarily safe.

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