[development] table vs tables

[Mark Fredrickson]

> The "obvious" way to break up the table would be to use 1000 a smaller
> tables, but too many tables can also cause a problem.

You might also look at table partitioning:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/partitioning-overview.html
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/ddl-partitioning.html

Basically, it splits one tall table into many, smaller chunks that
look and behave like a single table. So you don't have to change your
queries but you could possibly get some performance benefits by not
having to scan or load as much of a table into memory.

I'm not a DBA, so I don't know how this really ends up working in
practice, but that's the theory at least.

-Mark