# RE: Question on Db Table design

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-question-on-db-table-design/50532>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 17, 2005, 8:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-question-on-db-table-design/50532 "2005-12-17T20:04:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tomfakes](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/87869e/32.png) [@tomfakes](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tomfakes)\
**Post date:** [December 17, 2005, 8:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-question-on-db-table-design/50532/1 "2005-12-17T20:04:09Z")

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Databases are _really_ good at handling tables with millions of rows,  
and joins with other tables to retrieve sets of rows (assuming you have  
the correct indexes setup)

The only time you would worry about ‘too much data’ is when you get so  
many users that you swamp the database machine with requests. Only then  
would you look at partitioning the data, and, in your case, partitioning  
by user would make sense. The partitioning would be across database  
servers, not between tables on the same server, and here you would have  
the same schema on each server, and some way of deciding which server a  
particular user’s data would be saved on.