i am trying to redo my database structure as i am creating a lot of new tables and i believe it has become the reason i can't do a mysqldump anymore even though it's only about 250MB.

right now, i have about ~100,000 tables in a database. and each table has a few hundred rows.

so i wanted to know what is a better way could be to handle the database. do i just dump everything into one table and add another field so it would be 1 table with like 5M rows?

thanks

that is not something any of us can answer from the info you provided. What are all these tables for? What is the relationship between them? Have you read any books on database design? Thought about hiring someone to do your design work?
100,000 tables seems a bit extreme. I have worked on numerous large scale applications and They average 200 - 600 tables for an app. Rows ranging from 1 in a table to billions.

Dave Nance