Question

I’m making my first site with Django, and I’m having a database design problem.

I need to store some of the users history, and I don’t know whether it’s better to create a table like this for each user every time one signs up:

table: $USERNAME$

id  |  some_data  |  some_more  |  even_more

or have one massive table from the start, with everyone’s data in:

table: user_history

id  |  username  |  some_data  |  some_more  |  even_more

I know how to do the second one, just declare it in my Django models. If I should do the first one, how can I in Django?

The first one organises the data more hierarchically but could potentially create a lot of tables depending on the popularity of the service (is this a bad thing?)

The second one seems to more suit Django’s design philosophies (from what I’ve seen so far), and would be easier to run comparative searches between users, but could get huge (number of users * average items in history). Can MySQL handle, say, 1 billion records? (I won’t get that, but it’s good to plan ahead)

Answer 1

Definitely the second format is the way you want to go. MySQL is pretty good at handling large numbers of rows (assuming they’re indexed and cached as appropriate, of course). For example, all versions of all pages on Wikipedia are stored on one table in their database, and that works absolutely fine.