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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T07:58:39+00:00

I’ve been thinking about creating a forum in PHP so I did a little

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I’ve been thinking about creating a forum in PHP so I did a little research to see what the standard is for the tables that people create in the database. On most websites I’ve looked up, they always choose to have one table for the threads and a second for the posts on the threads.

Having a table for the threads seems perfectly rational to me, but one table to hold all the posts on all the threads seems like a little too much. Would it be better to create a table for each thread that will hold that thread’s posts instead sticking a few hundred thousand posts in one table?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The tables should represent the structure of the data in your database. If you have 2 objects, which in this case are your threads and your posts, you should put them in 2 tables.

    Trust me, it will be a nightmare trying to figure out the right table to show for each post if you do it the way you’re thinking. What would the SQL look like? Something like 

    SELECT *
FROM PostTable17256

    and you would have to dynamically construct this query on each request.

    However, by using 1 table, you can simply get a ThreadID and pass it as a variable to your query.

    SELECT *
FROM Posts
WHERE ThreadID = $ThreadID

    Relational databases are designed to have tables which hold lots of rows. You would probably be surprised what DBAs consider to be a “lot” by the way. A table with 1,000,000 rows is considered small to medium in most places.

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