How many mySQL tables is too many? (While working with DBI)

[Anonymous Monk]

I'm working on a Perl project and it currently uses about 50 different tables. Should I attempt to consolidate and lose readability and organization, or is there no efficiency hit along the Perl->DBI->mySQL pipeline?

[screamingeagle]

well, not knowing the details of your database schema will certainly hinder my reply. However, the general appraoch for database design is to make it conform to the Third Normal Form (3NF)
Here's are a few links to articles describing Data Normalization
Database Normalization Basics
First Normal Form
Second Normal Form
Third Normal Form hope this helps :-)

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi, I just wanted to take a moment and thank you for your reply. I read all of those links and they were extremely helpful. It will certainly assist me in my design. Thank you!

[perrin]

There's nothing inherently wrong with having a lot of tables. If you run into problems with joins being too slow, you could look into various forms of caching, including caching in a de-normalized table. Don't do that until you actually hit performance problems though.