Single or multiple databases

This question and thus my answer may be close to the gray line of subjective, but at the least I think it would be common practice to separate out the ‘admin’ tables into their own db for what it sounds like you’re doing. If you can tie a client to a specific server and db instance then by having separate db instances, it opens up some easy paths for adding servers to add clients. A single db would require you to monkey with various clustering approaches if you got too big.

[edit]Building in the idea early that each client gets it’s own DB also just sets the tone for how you develop when it is easy to make structural and organizational changes. Discovering 2 yrs from now you need to do it will become a lot more painful. I’ve worked with split dbs plenty of times in the past and it really isn’t hard to deal with as long as you can establish some idea of what the context is. Here it sounds like you already have the idea that the client is the context.

Just my two cents, like I said, you could be close to subjective on this one.

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