MySQL: Many tables or many databases?

Question

For a project we having a bunch of data that always have the same structure and is not linked together. There are two approaches to save the data:

• Creating a n

Answer 1

Why not create a single table to keep track of your pools (with a PoolID and PoolName as you columns, and whatever else you want to track) and then on your 15-25 tables you would add a column on all of them which would be a foreign key back to you pool table so you know which pool that particular record belongs to.

If you don't want to mix the data like that, I would suggest making multiple databases. Creating multiple tables all for the same functionality makes my spider sense tingle.