I'm currently building a web app in java. I was doing the db design when I ran in to a problem. Now I plan on having multiple clients running the web app at one time. Would performance be better if I had all my clients share the same db or split them up into their own separate smaller tables? Which one is better and why? MySql 4.01 latest production release.

TIA
Mike B

That's what databases are for! Really no need to split the data... As long as you handle transactions properly, there's really no problem... Splitting the data in separate tables for each client makes no sense... Do you really Yahoo! Finance did split their MySQL database in 10 million tables??? Do you think banks have separate tables for every client? As long as you have decent hardware, there's no problem in having multiple concurrent users hitting the same database... That's what databases are designed to handle!