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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T16:13:47+00:00

Say there is a website with 100,000 users each has up to 1000 unique

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Say there is a website with 100,000 users each has up to 1000 unique strings attached to them so that there are maximum 100,000,000 strings in total.
Would it be better to have 1 table with each string being one record along with it’s owner’s id. So that you end up with 1 table with 100,000,000 records with 2 fields (text and user id).

Or have 100,000 tables, one table for each user and the table’s name is the user’s id. and then 1000 records in each table, with just one field (the text).

Or instead of storing the strings in a database (there would be a character limit about the length of an SMS message) just store link to text files where there are 100,000,000 text files in a directory and each file has a unique name (random numbers and/or letters) and contains one of the strings? (or where each user has a directory and then their strings are in that directory?)

Which would be the most efficient option, the directory and database and then which sub option of those would be the most efficient?

(this question is obviously theoretical in my case, but what does a site like twitter do?)

(by efficiency I mean using the least amount of resources and time)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Or have 100,000 tables

    For the love of $DEITY, no! This will lead to horrible code – it’s not what databases are designed for.

    You should have one table with 100,000,000 records. Database servers are built to handle large tables, and you can use indexes and partitioning etc to improve performance if necessary.

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