Re: Best Practices for Many Millions of Rows

[Rick James]

Millions of rows is better than thousands of tables. End of discussion.

HIPAA compliance -- That is more serious than the volunteer advice you can get on this (or any other free) forum. You will need to pay for advice from Oracle or someone else qualified to deal with such.

If there is any splitting, it would probably be by clinic, not by patient. At that point, you may want to shard by clinic -- this provides a different level of isolation and encryption. With something like Docker or VM, you could have multiple clinics, each in its own MySQL instance, on a single server.

Check out Oracle's "encrypted at rest" offering.

I repeat; you will not achieve your goal for "free".