Single table or multiples tables (multiple company database)

I have to create a database for multiple companies, I have 2 options

1. A single products table, with a company_id field to differentiate

2. One table per company

   products_company1
products_company2
products_company3

Important:

• Data stored of each client will be updated every 1 hour
• Each company has 2000 – 3000 records, and 15 company will be stored approx.
• Products table is an example, each company has more tables.

I did a search, but did not find information about multiple tables, only multiple databases (I don’t think multiple databases its a good option for me)

Answer

You want option 1 under almost all circumstances. Here are some reasons:

1. Relational databases are optimized to work on large tables, not on large numbers of tables.
2. Maintaining foreign key relationships is very challenging.
3. Maintenance many tables (say by adding a column or changing a data type) is a nightmare compared to maintaining one table.
4. Answering a simple question such as “how many companies have product X” is a nightmare.

There are no doubt other reasons as well. These come to mind.