I would appreciate any thoughts on the question below. Thanks.

I need to create a database for a document/note/message management system, in which there are upto 10 million users, and each generates upto 50 docs/notes/messages per day. ( similar to an email management system).

- On one end, a simple way is to have one table for user, and another huge table for docs. I am afraid that this may be slow as the table gets bigger.

- The other end, is to have one table per each user, resulting in many many tables, but the operations (select/update/insert) may be much faster.

Which would be more appropriate choice? In my system, users don't share documents (just as email users don't share their emails). Any thoughts/opinions would be of great help. Thanks

single table for users, single table for documents

your statement "I am afraid that this may be slow as the table gets bigger" suggests that you don't know about indexing

rest assured, performance will not be a problem if your tables are properly optimized (indexes created on appropriate columns)

Thanks for the input.

Do you mean that even with the growth rate of 50mil record per day, the performance would not suffer with indexing?

50 million rows per day?

you'll need to hire a database administrator to help you with splitting the database across several servers

Moving to Database Concepts & Design topic

Table and index partitioning should definately be considered when working with that volume of data.