Re: Database Design Question

carlos(dot)mennens(at)gmail(dot)com (Carlos Mennens) writes:
> I was sitting down thinking the other day about when is it good to
> generate a new database or just use an existing one. For example, lets
> say my company name is called 'databasedummy.org' and I have a
> database called 'dbdummy'. Now I need PostgreSQL to manage several
> applications for my company:
>
> - webmail
> - software
> - mediawiki
> - phpbb forum
>
> Now what I've been doing is just creating multiple tables in the
> 'dbdummy' database but each table is owned by different users
> depending on their role. Is this bad? Should I be creating new
> databases for each application above rather than one single company
> database?
>
> Just trying to understand good DBA design practice. This is obviously
> a very general question but any feedback on what good or bad issues
> would come from me dumping all my tables for applications in one
> database or spread out across multiple databases on PostgreSQL.
>
> Thank you!

I think it's likely that these would properly have separate databases,
as...

- There isn't *that* much data that is likely to be shared between
these applications, so it probably doesn't add a lot of value to
force them together.

- If you integrate the databases together, then any maintenance on "the
database" represents an outage for *ALL* those systems, whereas if
they're separate, there's at least the possibility of outages being
independent.

You'll have to think about the expected kinds of failure cases to
determine in which direction to go.
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