Sql-server – Is maintaining a single database an issue when the underlying project becomes larger

This solution is called a multi-tenant design where each tenant (customer) has their own database. Given that, there are some other considerations to the alternative approach which is a single database:

1. With a single database, everyone must be on the same version no matter what. It isn't possible to upgrade some customers and not others. This can be problematic if a customer wants a hotfix of an application that isn't ready for wide release.
2. With a single database, when you do an upgrade, every client is down. If something goes wrong, every client is screwed.
3. With a single database, it is much more difficult to throttle resources. I.e., if one client is hammering the database, it is harder to give them more resources separate from everyone else.
4. It is much more difficult to allow users to host their own versions of your application. If you are building a solution that will be used by large enterprises, this is often a non-starter. Their IT department wants complete control over access to the system.
5. It is probably cheaper to scale out databases rather than scale them up. I.e., having to invest in faster hardware to host one database to rule them all is probably more expensive than being able to scale customers out to smaller, less expensive database servers. I can't say this one definitively because it depends greatly on the server software. If you stick with MySQL, this is probably true because the licensing costs are negligible. However, if you move up to SQL Server for example, scaling out becomes much more expensive unless you use a VPS environment and the cost-benefit of scaling up vs. scaling out changes. I can say, however, that once your database gets very large, management requires ever-greater levels of expertise. Very large databases require playing around with multiple filegroups and pushing certain indexes to different spindles to get better performance. In short, they get can complicated very quickly.

Having separate databases does mean you have to build an update mechanism which matches the database version with the application/site version. However, separate databases do provide superior isolation of data and IMO have a lower cost of hosting. It isn't a solution for all scenarios. If your system were never going to be hosted outside of your hosting and needed to scale up in customers rapidly and having all users on the same version of the application and database schema was desirable, then certainly having a single database is a better approach.

If this were my design decision, I would probably go with more of an 'Option C' (modified option a).

First, why not 'Option B':

For one thing, I like the clarity that each product has it's own table affords. If it's all one big table with a field to determine the type, the relation isn't as clear.

For another, the indexing strategy would always require that type field to be listed. Since it's only 4 types, the index cardinality is extremely low (SELECT * FROM product_table WHERE type='X' is basically doing a full table scan anyway)

Option C

• Create a parent table that holds only the columns that all types share
• Create each product type as it's own table with their individual columns, with one extra: A link to the parent table
• Create each 'link' table: Product_Option, Model_option, etc with links to the respective keys.
• For those with reciprocal links (MODEL_OPTION, OPTION_MODEL) go ahead and create those tables as well. This will add clarity in your joins for anyone looking at it.

The downside is the complexity of making sure to avoid orphans when things are updated/deleted, and initially designing the queries that use these tables.