Question

I’m undertaking a project with a learning purpose. Since this project is compelling to me because of its topic I want to build good foundations and maybe put it live eventual.

Since my project is quite complex, to explain you what my question is I’m gonna use a fiction project that is an agenda application.

This web application will have a calendar where the user can add events and reminders.It will be used by, lets say, 10,000 users and those 10,000 users will add thousands of events and reminders.

My question is which of the two methods would you recommend related to database structure?

• Should I create a separate database with reminders and events tables for each user (on user creation) and relate the databases to a user in a separate database
• or should I make one table for events, one for reminders and one for users and relate them to one another in a single database?

I haven’t done any multi-user web applications so far and I am not familiar with database structures approach when it comes to many users. Please if there are any design patterns that you think of, I would appreciate sharing 🙂

Answer 1

Here’s my opinion:

1. No, you should not create a separate database for each user. It can’t scale. It means that every time you add a user, you have to create a new database? Never.
2. One database, multiple users – that’s what relational databases are born for.

10,000 users is not that large an audience. Each creating thousands of events and reminders would mean 10M events, 10M reminders. That’s not considered a large relational database.

You may need to worry about partitioning and purging old records. What kind of policy will you have in place for keeping those events and reminders? What access will users have after a year? Five years? Ten years? Those would be good topics to think about, too.

Get a good book about entity/relationship modeling and read it carefully. Anything modern on Amazon will do.