as far as processing requirements, is it generally better to have alot of smaller tables that you link through joins, etc, or to have 1 big table?

It is generally better to have the right number of tables to normalise your data - no more and no less.

What kind of processing requirements? What layout of data? How frequent are the updates?

This is a juggling act, trying to decide what resources you want to conserve, what resources you can be fairly generous with, and which issues are important to "hold the line" on just to preserve what little sanity you might have left!

-PatP

im not quite sure of that yet, as i am still in the planning process. i was looking for a 'rule of thumb' kind of answer, something that in most normal casese should be followed.

Then I'd suggest that you take the data to at least third normal form. That will avoid most of the ugly problems that you can find with INSERT/DELETE anomolies, but still keep the tables from being fragmented to oblivion.

-PatP