What's better - many small tables or one big table?

Question

I\'ve got a database which will store profiles about individuals. These individuals have about 50 possible fields.

Some are common things like, first name, last nam

Answer 1

From what you've described I'd certainly break that into multiple tables. I wouldn't split on an arbitrary number of columns though, instead try to think of logical collections of columns that either make up an entity or match the access patterns you're going to be using to hit the data