Database speed optimization: few tables with many rows, or many tables with few rows?

Question

I have a big doubt.

Let\'s take as example a database for a whatever company\'s orders.

Let\'s say that this company make around 2000 orders per month, so, a

Answer 1

Smaller tables are faster. Period.

If you have history that is rarely used, then getting the history into other tables will be faster.

This is what a data warehouse is about -- separate operational data from historical data.

You can run a periodic extract from operational and a load to historical. All the data is kept, it's just segregated.