Database planning

Say I have 10 grocery stores each with 300 products. Would it be better to have a separate table for each store or one big table with the product containing a store id? When does the number of records become an issue with mysql?

Thanks for the help,

Robert

that would all depend on how well your database is written/planned out. Some websites claim to have millions of records in mysql with no problems but I'm sure 10k records in a poorly designed DB could slow to a crawl. It would depend on the database layout, server speed, server load, number of servers (in a clustered environment), how complicated the query is...and tons of other things.

what is the purpose of the database? Is it geared toward the stores or the products in the stores? What kind of data will you be pulling out of it? What kind of scale are you planning on?

off the top of my head since I am assuming a many to many relationship - 3 tables - 1 for the company, 1 for the product and a brdige table to associate the products to the store.

The bridge table can have huge amounts of data in it but with proper indexing to the outer tables, JOINs would have no problems.