A real problem with the tables number

Anon

Hello!
I really hope that You will carefully consider this situation:
Being a customer of a hosting service - it's addres is
http://www.valuehost.ru
-for only 4 monthes and also being a newcomer in the internet,
I decided to create a MySQL-database-supported site about the city I live in(St.Petersburg,Russia) --
http://www.spb-explorer.ru
At the beginning I realized that there are going to be many informative points about each object-
whether it is a street,house,an enterprise or an item-
so there was a question about how to place this information - in a form of a table for each property
for each object or just as ,say,a string in a main table for each object.
I have asked my hosting-support-service many times, but got no reply.
I also have asked some acquintances of mine,whom I considered to be specialists-
they said that I may have as many tables in my database as the memory I paid for allows.
And also I have read some books about MySQL.
So I accepted the 'table-consuming' way for the reason of speed.
That means , that every object,there are hundreds and going to be thousands,has some 5 - 10 tables
for every property it has got - a link's list, a subobject's list ,etc.
But today I got a letter from my hosting administrator saying (in a rude way - but it
is another matter) that I am kind of disturbing the whole server's work
because of the amount of tables in my database.And he also threatened to switch off
my site.But it's not him that bothers me - I can remove my domain.
It is the question of
HOW MANY TABLES I CAN HAVE IN MY DATABASE

If I am right ( meaning this number is endless) - so I would nail this son of a gun..
In case I am not - it means that I will have to change the whole architecture of
my database.So I would do - but the question remains: Why did I not find anything
about it in the precious books. Or am I wrong? A there any official links that could
say anything about it?

Please answer a.s.a.p. - it is urgent to me.
Sincerely Yours
Lisitsin
P.S. A war is nothing - a manoeuvre is everithing (AN OLD RUSSIAN PROVER😎

Anon

sdjg;skjhg

amcgrath

At the risk of having to go to court some time in the future and filing a restraining order, I'll take a stab at this:

You should have as many tables in your databse as are needed to support your application. Now, unless there is a disk space constraint imposed by your hosting service, then this would effect the database's size, but most likely meaning less data than less tables.

Having said that, you should really study the rules of normalization so that you don't go overboard and make tables for everything under the sun.

But, in the end, to answer your specific question, a database should have as many tables needed to support the applcation. System constraints, hardware availablity, etc., may effect this, but it still stands.

mrskhris

I would suggest you check your database queries and try to optimize them. Size usually is not a problem - the problem is how much processor/web-server time you are "eating" when doing queries.

[deleted]

Ofcourse there is a limit to how many tables you can have in your database. Check the mysql manual, I think it's somewhere in the 32000 range.

But more importantly, you don't need that many tables. (you don't, so don't insist that you do)

If your design for a simple city-information site needs thousands of tables, then you are making a BIG mistake.

You may get thousands of ROWS, but never more than 10-20 tables at most.

You need to read about database-normalization. start here:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/barry20000731.php3