So I’m working on site that will replace an older site with a lot of traffic, and I will also have a lot of data in the DB, so my question to you guys is what is the best way to design mysql tables for growth?
I was thinking to split let’s say a table with 5 000 000 rows in 5 tables,with 1 000 000 rows/table and create a relationship between the tables, but I guess this isn’t a good option since I will spend a lot of resources and time to figure out in what table my data is.
Or can you guys give me some tips mabe some useful articles?
No, you’re absolutely right on the relationships. This technique is called Normalization where you define separate tables because these individual tables are affected with time and independent of other tables.
So if you have a hotel database that keeps a track of rooms and guests, then you know normalization is necessary because rooms and guests are independent of each other.
But you will have foreign keys/surrogate keys in each table (for instance, room_id) that could relate the particular guest entering for that particular room.
Normalization, in your case, could help you optimize that 5000 rows of yours as it would not be optimal for a loop to go over 5000 elements and retrieve an entire data.
Here is a strong example for why normalization is essential in database management.