hi all,

ok now i know this is going to be somewhat of a noob question, however its something thats never occurred to me (or maybe it has, I'm just suffering a lapse of intelligence because i'm doing this at 3:50am).

I'm designing an application as part of the course i'm doing, the application covers several categories in a workplace environment, you know, one part handles a rota, another part handles jobs & responsibilities, another part handles staff petty cash etc.

A lot of these different 'arms' of the application require the same 'userID', i'm drawing up the ERD now and i'm nearly done (i hope) and I've just thought:

if all of these different 'arms' of the application handle different things, should they be designed seperately (create an instance for every record?) or do they all go together (as in a relational database?)

sorry if this question seems dumb, but the application handles other, sensitive data and i'm sure knowing what it was the application actually did would make more sense, if anyone could help me shed some light on my problem i'd really appreciate it

lol, i think i mean design a separate database for each 'arm'