tec4 - 6:20 pm on Oct 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

I'm trying to figure out the table design for my MySQL table for system users.

Currently I have 3 different sets of user: salespeople, leads, partners (sales people w/ different companies)

I will probably be adding more people to the mix soon such as: insurance reps, loan officers, etc.

Basic of how system users will interact:

Salespeople can have many leads and each lead belongs to only one salesperson.

Partners are global in that they are not assigned to specific salespeople and any salesperson can interact with any partner.

The other additions will probably be global as well..but I'm not quite sure yet. Anyways, would it be more efficient/logical to have one massive 'users' table to contain all the info for each category of users or to create a table for each and reference them that way?

One other note, is that the main three (salespeople, leads, partners) will all have a log in platform so the system will have to store and handle sessions and username/passwords of each...just in case that makes things any more complex..not sure.

Essentially this is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System. I've looked at the Table structures for a couple other systems including SugarCRM and it seems like they have separate tables for their main categories (but they dont have as many categories, I don't think)