Re: DB Design of GMail: Multiple tables vs. one table?

I see your point.

I am indeed doing my homework right now. I am considering to build a message swap system (a web app) so that my 2000 users will be able to exchange messages with each other (actually NO email involved - the only way they can send/read messages is through our web app. No open protocol.). So, for me, it is simple: I am just building a web app pretty much like a web mail system so my users can log in and send/read messages to each other.

My problems are (1) I need to convert historic data to the new system. The historical data are like 2000+ messages for each user.(2) The users will use the system frequently so the scalability requirement is to be able to efficiently access the mail box for 5000 messages/user.

So now you understand why I am so focused on that multiple table vs. signle table choice ... I just thought by looking at DB design of web mail systems, I can make the right choice. I don't have a lot of large scale DB experience: I don't know if it will be efficient to access a 10-million row table if we index on userId. Received on Mon Apr 04 2005 - 00:14:03 CDT