Questions about Database Design for a Web Application

Question

Consider a web application with 100,000 users. Each user can create blog posts. Assume each user has 100 entries.

Would it be appropriate to store all the users in one table, with another table to store the entries made by each user?

Is this a bad design? What would be an efficient way to store all the information to facilitate quick access of the information?

• jcolebrand: Note kindly the relative youth of our asker when considering if this is a question you can post a copy of for yourself. We don't mind discussing the internals of db's and why certain designs are good, but we don't want to see a lot of this duplicated, and we will close future questions highly similar to this in the future as duplicates of this one.

Answer 1

100k records in a single non-partitioned table is a relatively trivial number. Nothing to worry about assuming you follow normalization guidelines and index appropriately.

Take a look at some example schemas to avoid schoolboy errors. Study sample databases, like the Microsoft examples for SQL Server. When you've created your schema, post a new question for feedback.

Answer 2

If your database will use the normal RDBMS such as MS SQL Server, or MySQL 100 000 records is normal. Just learn about normalization, as Mark said, and indexes.