Design and Performance Question

Hi,

I have a basic DB design question.

First, my application has 100's of customers, all of which will be adding thousands of records each day.

My question is, because of the eventual size of some of these tables, should I have a separate DB for each customer or should I design one DB to hold all customers?

I am worried about some of the massive joins that will eventually take place, also what if I have to do a restore on just one customer's data.

So what should I do, one massive DB, or one DB per customer?

Thanks for you input!

SQL Server is quite capable of handling tables with millions of rows of data. Properly indexed and maintained, performance should not be a big problem. Managing hundreds of databases, however, could become quite wieldly.

The only reason I'd separate customers into their own databases would be for security reasons in the event that each customer directly accessed their data through some web-based application. In that event it's more secure to keep each customer to its own database, preventing inadvertent access to another customer's data.