I've searched around quiet a bit for an answer to my question but haven't been successful so now I hope that the members of this great forum can enlighten me with a satisfactory answer.

Ok so my question may sound like a newbie one and for that forgive me but in all my other web applications using db's one database containing all tables did the job just fine as they were not too full with content. But my newest database driven site is a very large-scale social networking and resource site and for that reason I have the following question:

Which is better structure, 1 database with all tables needed or many databases with 1-2 tables in each??

I hope you can help me with this and apologies for the long intro.

Thanks in advance!

1 database with all the tables is certainly the most widely used database design.

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But would that be considered the best solution and most efficient or just the most common?

Yes, it will be.

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Necessity is the mother of invention.

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There is no need for more the one database unless you are dealing with millions and millions of rows. At that point you would need an SQL server. Just use one database.

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That's great guys. Thanks alot for the rapid feedback!