Question

I have the option to use a single table that will expand upwards of 1,000,000 records per year.

With that said, I could use a foreign key to break up this table into muitiple smaller tables, which will reduce this expansion to each smaller table of 100,000 records per year.

Lets say 50% of the time, users will query all of the records where the other 50% of the time users will query the segmented smaller table data set. ( think based on all geographic areas vs. specific geographic areas)

Using a database managed by a shared hosting account ( think site5, godaddy, etc… ), is it faster to use a single larger table or to use several smaller segmented tables given this situation?

Where each dataset is accessed 10%/%90, 20%/%80, %30/%70… etc, at what point would using a single table vs muiltiple smaller tables be the most/least efficient?

Answer 1

In general do it so as to reduce the amount of duplicated information. If you are making smaller tables which have many redundant columns, then it seems like it’d be more efficient to have just one table. But otherwise, one table.

It also depends on what percent of the row is being used per query, and how your queries are structured. If you are adding lots of joins or subqueries, then it’ll most likely be slower.