MySQL database design

Question

I'm setting up a MySQL database and I'm not sure of the best method to structure it:

I am setting up a system (PHP/MySQL based) where a few hundred people will be executing SELECT/UPDATE/SET/DELETE queries to a database (probably about 50 simultaneously). I imagine there are going to be a few thousand rows if they're all using the same database and table. I could split the data across a number of tables but then I would have to make sure they're all uniform AND I, as the administrator, will be running some SELECT DISTINCT queries via cron to update an administrative interface.

What's the best way to approach this? Can I have everybody sharing one database? one table? Will there be a problem when there are a few thousand rows? I imagine there is going to be a huge performance issue over time.

Any tips or suggestions are welcome!

Answer 1

MySQL/php can easily handle this as long as your server is powerful enough. MySQL loves RAM and will use as much as it can (within the limits you provide).

If you're going to have a lot of concurrent users then I would suggest looking at using innodb tables instead of MyISAM (the default in MySQL versions <5.5). Innodb locks individual rows when doing INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE etc, rather than locking the whole table like MyISAM does.

We use php/MySQL and would have 1000+ users on our site at the same time (our master db server does about 4k queries per second).