Is it better to separate large amounts of data into different tables or is it better to all clump it up into one table.
How does this affect indexing and performance?
Ex. Suppose I have alot of data like kijiji postings. Is it better to separate the postings per table labeled by categories or is it easier to optimize performance with one large table of all my postings and indexed through columns labeled as categories.
This is a school project, nothing large scale. I’m not talking about separating my data into blocks, as I don’t know how to do that yet.
Except in very rare cases you should always normalize your data to at least 3rd normal form. Simply (and somewhat incorrectly) this means store each piece of data once and once only, i.e. multiple tables. This minimizes the chance of data corruption and with appropriate indexing will be fast.