Database design: one huge table or separate tables?

Posted by littlegreen on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by littlegreen
Published on 2010-05-04T14:49:29Z Indexed on 2010/05/04 14:58 UTC
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database-design

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data-warehouse

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sql-server

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sql-server-2008

Currently I am designing a database for use in our company. We are using SQL Server 2008. The database will hold data gathered from several customers. The goal of the database is to acquire aggregate benchmark numbers over several customers.

Recently, I have become worried with the fact that one table in particular will be getting very big. Each customer has approximately 20.000.000 rows of data, and there will soon be 30 customers in the database (if not more). A lot of queries will be done on this table. I am already noticing performance issues and users being temporarily locked out.

My question, will we be able to handle this table in the future, or is it better to split this table up into smaller tables for each customer?

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