Re: Design question: Scalability and tens of thousands of tables?

On Nov 4, 2005, at 9:47 AM, pgsql-sql-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org wrote:

> The problem is I am very concerned about scalability with having a
> different
> table created for each custom object. I want to design to site to
> handle
> tens of thousands of users. If each user has 3-5 custom objects the
> database would have to handle tens of thousands of tables.
>
> So it would appear that this is a broken solution and will not
> scale. Has
> anyone designed a similar system or have ideas to share?

Well, before you discount it, did you try out your design? You could
do initial segregation of user's tables into separate schemas (say,
schema 'a' -> 'z' according to username or some better hashing
routine like brute-force round-robin assignment at user creation
time). Assignment of objects -> schema would be one additional column
in your centralized user directory table(s).

----
James Robinson
Socialserve.com