Best practice for storing very large amount of data in database table

Question

Using: LAMP (PHP5, MYSQL 5+/MyISAM)

I am consuming a lot of data from a number of different feeds. There could be hundreds or thousands+ of records on any given day.

The data will be searchable and frequently will be.

Is it safe/optimal to house the data in one table with related data for categories in a different table?

Someone, who I respect, has the opinion to create tables for each category of the data and house the data in respective tables.

Answer 1

If you don't need to compare data across different categories, then storing in separate tables will improve performance. However, you might want to look at using partitions . This will allow you to manage storage of each category separately while keeping them in the same table.