Question

I need to have a lot of user data in the database. Now, I’ve been thinking about having two tables, users that would have only the id, username and password and another table userData that would have everything else like name, lastname etc.

Is this a prefered method?

Answer 1

The simplest design would put all the fields in one table. From that point, though, there are a bunch of reasons you might want to consider splitting that information up into multiple tables. From your description, I cant’ tell whether there are any valid reasons to do so.

If you start with one table, you might find it advantageous to split the data for reasons such as:

• Normalization.
• Reducing contention (different parts of the app update different information)
• Truly huge column lists (look into the limit for your DB)
• Other?? (how you’re going to maintain your app, maybe?)

In short, I’d try to start simple and have a reason to pick the more complex design if you go that route.