[mjjwatson]

I'm making an application where users can save their own quizzes onto the system. At the moment I have a 'questions' table that stores all the questions from all the quizzes and users.

I was wondering if this is the best way to do it? I imagine if every user has 100 questions on average submitted, with hundreds of users, the amount of rows in the single table will be huge eventually.

Will this cause performance problems? My alternative is to give every user there own table, but I was wondering if this is entirely necessary? Can mysql handle huge amount of rows without a problem?

[End User]

Originally Posted by mjjwatson

I'm making an application where users can save their own quizzes onto the system. At the moment I have a 'questions' table that stores all the questions from all the quizzes and users.

I have a number of mySQL tables with 3 and 4 million rows in them. It's not that unusual and it normally won't cause performance issues unless you're storing very large amounts of text or BLOBs in each row. One of the tables I'm working with now has ~3.2 million rows and is ~350 megs or so. It really shouldn't be a problem for your application.

Originally Posted by mjjwatson

My alternative is to give every user there own table, but I was wondering if this is entirely necessary?

Don't do this...it'll cause you all sorts of ugly problems later on. Ask me how I know....

[mjjwatson]

How do you know?

[therocket954]

Originally Posted by End User

Don't do this...it'll cause you all sorts of ugly problems later on. Ask me how I know....

I hope this doesn't involve your uncle and more homemade fireworks.

But yes, as well I've seen some massive mysql databases that still operate just fine regardless of size. You'll have a problem with scaling it before you have a problem with it's size.

[End User]

Originally Posted by mjjwatson

How do you know?

Because at one time I wrote an app that gave each user their own table...and before long I had an app with about 2,500 tables and it was growing daily. By the time I redesigned it to a more sensible format, I had 5 databases that did nothing but hold user tables, and there were ~12,000 tables spread among the 5 databases.

Trust me, don't do it this way. If you must, create a set of key tables and spread the users among them sequentially, but don't create a table for each user.

[End User]

Originally Posted by therocket954

I hope this doesn't involve your uncle and more homemade fireworks.

No, but I could tell you about my other uncle...his last words were, "HEY A TRUCK-"