WordPress MU

Here at Plymouth State University, we are evaluating a number of different blogging solutions for our campus. Just about everyone who works here uses and LOVES wordpress, but we are wondering why wordpress mu creates a new set of tables for each user. Our DBA's are griping about it, but we are thinking that there is most likely a really good reason for it. I can't imagine that we would ever have more users than wordpress.com, so we are just wondering how you guys are doing it? Is the database a nightmare to manage with so many tables?

If you've got the bandwidth it's no problem at all.

Hey mrpearson.

As far as i understand the idea of author of mu, this is for Wordpress Single User compatibility and for easy import. Okay, its not the best decision, and it's possible to rewrite system, but i dont think its a big problem with having masses of tables. Ask those who have mu with 1500+ users aboard.

Thanks for the replys... We are talking about scaling this thing to 30,000+ users, so there are a number of issues with having so many tables. Not the lease of which being inode problems on the disk that holds the database. We want to provide blogging to all faculty, staff, students, and alumni. I can see some advantaes in terms of backup and resore of individual tables, but the idea of having a number of tables approaching a half-million is a little scary. Can WPMU use inodb?

So, mrpearson its a good deal to recode some parts of WPMU. If i had freetime i'd try

I've only ever seen options for MySQL. I don't think WPMU (or WP, for that matter) supports InnoDB. Anyone else know better than me? Am I wrong on that?

yep, you can rewrite wp-db.php to support your own db driver

Well, yeah, but only MySQL is supported "out of the box."

Yes, sure.
But Those DB classes are written specially for suck cases. To let administrator rewrite it easily.