is having millions of tables and millions of rows within them a common practice in MySQL database design?

Question

I am doing database design for an upcoming web app, and I was wondering from anybody profusely using mysql in their current web apps if this sort of design is efficient for

Answer 1

SQL Server has many ways you can support large tables. You may find some help by splitting your indexes across multiple partitions (filegroups), placing large tables on their own filegroup, and indexes for the large table on another set of filegroups.

A filegroup is basically a separate drive. Each drive has its own dedicated read and write heads. The more drives the more heads are searching the indexes at a time and thus faster results finding your records.

Here is a page that talks in details about filegroups.

http://cm-bloggers.blogspot.com/2009/04/table-and-index-partitioning-in-sql.html