# Associated databases, good or bad?

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/associated-databases-good-or-bad/269699>\
**Category:** programming\
**Created:** [August 31, 2008, 12:47am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/associated-databases-good-or-bad/269699 "2008-08-31T00:47:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nburlington](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex011/user_avatar/forum.kirupa.com/nburlington/32/1365_2.png) [@nburlington](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/nburlington)\
**Post date:** [August 31, 2008, 12:47am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/associated-databases-good-or-bad/269699/1 "2008-08-31T00:47:51Z")

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I need some advice on planning a database structure.

Is it a bad idea to break up your data into different databases? For example, if I am collecting:

username  
password  
firstname  
lastname  
address  
etc

and then  
last movie rented  
favorite movie

…would there be any reason to break out the movie data from the user info data?

The reason I ask is that my hosting plan has a 100mb space limit. I’m sure i’m being too cautious about hitting the ceiling but I’d like to have a plan just in case.

If you had multiple databases with associated data, are you incurring a larger delay time to query the extra db? Just curious.