Hi, wondering if anyone could please help.

I have been writing an ASP/MySQL application over the last 12 months. In the
last month the company who have paid me have brought 8 other companies which do
the same as what they do. So, as you can imagine I am concerned. I have a main
database with around 20 tables. The busiest table / the one with potential to
become the largest contains around 15 columns. I have calculated that within 6
months, this table could quite easily have 10,000,000 (10m) records or worse
case 200,000,000 (200m) records. So I have run a test and carried out a bulk
insert of 5,000,000 (5m) records and as you can imagine, accessing this over the
web is very/too slow to be practical.

So, I need to split the database. My initial thought was to split the database
by adding an extra table for every new client who joins and it is predicted to
be 1,000 clients per year which is the same as the previous years. I then
thought this would be the same as my initial method because MySQL has to first
access one of the 1,000 tables and then one of the thousands of records which
would not make any difference.

My final thought and this is my question: I have decided to add a completely
new database for every client. This is not a problem because the data does not
need to be relational between clients. This means having 1,000
databases/folders and I will use a DSN string with the 'database=;' value to
equal the relevant client/database name. My conception is that the OS (Windows)
will access any one of the 1,000 databases quicker than MySQL can and then MySQL
will find the details from the relevant database which will only be 1,000th the
size of my initial idea.....

Does anybody know if this is correct?

I certainly can't have one large table because the database will be too slow.

Thanks very much in advance.