Greg K — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 23:01:58 +0000

Well good news, I was getting frustrated, so I wrote to one of the founders (i think) of the hosting company. (I have all e-mails saved from when I first signed up with then in 1997, and back then they responded to support from their personal accounts)

Here it turns out that when I inquired about this to begin with and was told I couldn't have access to the mysql root account, either back then they didn't allow it, or i was just told wrong. In any case, they are changing my account to give me access to mySQL root.

YEAH!

As to why it needs to be individual, well for a practical reason, if for some reason the file gets corrupt, then it is only one customers data corrupt, instead of them all (still very unlikely), from a PR standpoint, it is amazing how reassuring it is to customers that their information is not "sitting next" to someone else (they enter very detailed company info like payroll, etc).

-Greg

JeevesBond — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 23:46:30 +0000

The closest thing I can think of is known as Database Federation and is used where very data-heavy databases are split physically (usually across seperate servers) so one server is not too heavily loaded. The best example of this is the speeding ticket system in the US: The database is split by the state the persons car is from, so when a police person creates a ticket the system checks the database for the current state first. As most of the cars driving around a particular state are going to have license plates (or number plates as we call them) from that state, it makes sense to look in that database first, then search through the other databases afterwards. The huge amount of data is neatly split across lots of different servers though, but is still accessible.

There is another name for what you're trying to do though, and that's madness!

Database federation has it's place, and is not normally needed for 200 customers (unless they each have terabytes of data associated with them!) The first thing for you to do is have a serious look at the way your database is designed. It's rather disturbing that you need to create a new table for each customer! Something is _very_ wrong with a database if you have to change the schema every day (with some noteable exceptions, such as hosting).

Why do you need to create a new table for every customer? If you don't mind me asking.

Shirthead — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 14:20:33 +0000

Sounds like a very complicated way to get around an inflexible host.