multiple database dilemma

Hi,
I'm designing the database of an E-commerce project. Think of one branch of an organization. I made the design and it's like 15 tables. Estimate number of users would be around 500.
(assume only %20 of them access to the system daily  and the largest table will have max of 100.000 records and number of branches are very likely to increase up to 300-400.)

Now the problem is; think of 50 of these branches. Exactly the same database structure would be required. My dilemma is;

1. I can add a branchID field inside every table
2. I can create a seperate DB for each branch.

Let me not forget to mention that the queries are not multidatabase queries.

The disadvantage of the first approach is, tables will be overloaded. One branch would be using only its portion of the table (1/50) where total table size will be 50 times larger. This will slow down the joins and selects. The performance is crucial since its a web application.

My concern with the second approach is, same pages would be serving different clients simultaneously, there will be simultanous requests from the WEB server which switches between different databases. And this might also slow down the performance.

Am I thinking reasonable or is something missing. Please advice.
Thanks in advance. Received on Mon Aug 19 2002 - 19:34:11 CDT