theory help

jasondavis

I have a table that is used to see basicly who is who's friend on my social network site, similar to myspace

I have around 13,000 users which creates 307,510 rows on my friend table which see's who is who's friend, I heard of people on much larger sites, splitting this into smaller tables but Im lost as for how my code would know which table to look into

Roger_Ramjet

What you are probably thinking of is partitioning. Now some databases support partitioned tables, but mysql does not. What it does support is clusters where the data is stored across several machines - not something you need to worry about yet.

Don't worry about a few 100K rows, that is nothing for a db.

jasondavis

My concern is 300,000 rows is from a week, so it will be in the millions fast

Roger_Ramjet

Well this is where you learn to use search options: google for database performance benchmarks and you'll see what an RDBMS is capable of; or use the search option at the top of the page to see exhaustive discussions on the issue right here.

There are people running databases with terabytes of data and multi-million row tables that have no problems at all. What does matter is the hardware that you're running on, and then the design of first the application and then the backend database it uses.