One Database for site and forum?

[babil]

Hello all,
I'm programing a database driven website and there will be a forum too. Should there be two databases, one for the site content and one for the forum? Or only one should do the work?
The traffic won't be enormous.
Any suggestions?

cheers babil

[Frank_Rizzo]

I presume you mean with something like MySQL and that you will have databases:

site (tables: articles, authors....)
forum (tables: messages, users, logs)

Best to keep them seperate as caching will be more efficient this way I believe. Also would be better for secuirty as you could set different permissions for each database incase a forum member managed to get hold of single password etc.

OK, in both cases table caching, or table permissions could do the same thing but it's easier to administer at the database level.

Another reason for having two seperate databases is that it would be easier to maintain backup scropts. You may want to backup the forum db every hour, and the site db every 24hrs. Again, this could be done with a single database but it's easier with two.

[babil]

hi,
thanks for the quick reply. It sounds very reasonable.
It is better to be on the safe side , even if it costs 1-2 euros more!
Thanks again
babils

[Sarah Atkinson]

i have all of mine in one db but it is a very small db and we couln't see spending the extra $$. The site does not make us any $$ nor do the forums and while I have sujested adding advertisments. the board feels that doing so would afect our unbias image. I think I would perfer to have multiple db but given the situation the single db works just fine