Hi,

I just wanted to know what you guys think, is it best to have one database with all the tables you will need for your website, or to devide the database into different categories.

That is, do you prefer to have different databases with different names for different tasks, or do you make one database that can handle all the tasks on the website?

Thanks

/Thomas

This depends on the complexity of the website.

I think keeping all the tables in one database will be good.


Om Prakash

In my case the website is quite complexed, and as it is now I have about five or six different databases. I quess I could combine them all, but that would lead to allot of re-coding. Therefor I dont feel that I want to do it in vain.

Besides, will it be better in terms of loading time? That is my main consern.

BS
As it is now, somethimes I must access two or even three different databases in one single document, and I just want to know if that is resource-demanding.
DS

If you tell us a bit about your application design, and explain why you have chosen for different databases, we might be able to give you some hints.

Personally, I would try to keep things for one application in one database. This makes it much easier to JOIN related tables on each other. It's much more difficult to join, say, a Customers table in one database with an Orders table in another.

How complex is complex in your situation? Why do you have so many databases?

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

Okay, here´s the thing...

I have for example two different categories on my website. One is called "News" and one is called "Articles". On the first site (default) I have to open two different databases because I want to view both News and Articles on the same page. What I want to know is if I should prefer to combine these two databases into one, even though they are two totaly different sections of the website.

Also, im making other sections that has databases with alot of tables, and I was thinking that it would be hard to keep track of witch tables belong to witch category if I deside to combine the databases.

Thanks for helping out. I want the website to run as quickly as possible, and therefor I would like to know if this is an issue.

Again, it depends on your entire application design (is all the information added and used from within the same application? Do users add records through a Web interface? Are there any back-end apps that need this info as well), but personally, I would create one database for a Web app like this.

In fact, I would even recommend a single table for the base characteristics. If you look at this from an Object Oriented way, a News Item and an Article have a lot in common. On my own web site, I have stuff like News, Articles, FAQs, Snippets etc etc. I designed a base class called Content. The Content class defines the generic properties that all content items share: a Title, an Author, a CreateDate, a ContentType etc etc. In my database, all this information is stored in a single table called Content.

More specialized information (e.g. the Question and the Answer of a FAQ item) is stored in separate tables, like FAQ. The FAQ table is linked to the Content table based on its ContentID.

To display specific information, I can do something like this:

SELECT ID, Title FROM Content WHERE ContentType = 3

This gets me all the News items, for example.

Storing related information in the same database and even same table makes a lot of things much easier. For example: my security layer uses the Content.ID to determine access for specific users. If I had stored my content in multiple database and tables, security maintenance would have much tougher.

Of course this is just one method of doing things. There are many other good and probably even better ways. It all depends on what you try to accomplish. If performance is the most important ingredient in your design: go for one database. If you depend on other (legacy) systems for your data, you sometimes don't even have the opportunity to use a single database. In such scenarios, you often have to deal with multiple databases and multiple database servers.....

HtH,

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

Thanks for the tips Imar

Cheers...