[rsteele]

I've been working on a new web DB for my company and would like some input regarding hot to design for several e-com websites.

I'm currently running 3 e-com sites off on 1 instance of MS SQL on Win2K Server with several more planned in the future. All of these use rougly the same data, but each site pulls data targeted for that site. We use an "off the shelf" shopping cart that manages it's own MS SQL DB. We can't really muck with that DB since all of the SQL is buried in the ASP, but my dream is to move all of the SQL nto the backend and wrap it up in SP's.....one day!

Since it's starting to become cumbersome to keep everything updated and consistant between the 7 (3 e-com and 4 info) sites, I'm learning the fine art of seperating content, logic, and design and want to store all content in a DB.

My questions are:
1) Should I set up a MS SQL database for each site and using ASP and stored procs, A) make calls to that site's DB and let that DB handle the call to get product data, B) make calls directly to the products DB?(ASP componets are not used and are out of my league right now)

2) Should I keep all content in the each site's DB and pull content as needed or keep content updated using web tasks, templates, XML, etc?

Any links to good whitepapers/articles about designing DB's for mulitiple sites would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help and/or advice.
Randy