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

There is not database organization that's 100% correct, there's only one that's good enough for your purposes. If you don't foresee surpassing the capabilities of a single good database server in the future, then normalize the data and use plenty of constraints such as foreign keys, cascading deletes and such as that will make your database a joy to work with. On the other hand if you look at the databases of a lot of applications that have billions of requests you'll find that they forgo a lot of these niceties in the name of performance and scalability.