Question

I’m integrating punBB into my existing site. Is it better to continue using one DB and add the new tables into my current setup or is it better to maintain a second DB for the forum. I guess my main concern is performance and maintainability. It seems easier to maintain just one DB but are there performance gains or losses with a second DB?

Answer 1

Assuming punbb does like every other forum and prefixes the table names (eg. punbb_users, punbb_messages, etc.) and you’re not going to have any table name collisions, one database should be fine.

As far as performance, that depends on how integrated your setup is. Opening another connection to a separate database may be a little more overhead, however re-using the same connection for normal site intricacies and the forum itself would be more efficient. Once thing you may question is how big your site is and how much traffic it does as not every circumstance makes a new connection negligible.

If it makes sense logically and everything is self-contained, I would probably go with one database. it also makes database backups/restores easier as it’s all one entity, but if you’re on a hosted provider that may not matter as much to you.