Re: Multiple Databases - Search and retrieve.

[Rick James]

> My webspace provider, is offering me unlimited DBs but these can only have size of 1GB each.
Strange limitation. He does mean "database" and not "table", correct?

What is your rough calculation of the space you need?

Consider compressing the text parts of the articles -- this will shrink English (at least) by about a factor of 3.

However, compression would prevent the use of FULLTEXT.

FULLTEXT indexes are often bigger than the uncompressed text that it is indexing.

So, let's say you have to have several GB of FULLTEXT indexes.
SELECT ... FROM db1.tbl WHERE MATCH ...
UNION ALL
SELECT ... FROM db2.tbl WHERE MATCH ...
UNION ALL
SELECT ... FROM db3.tbl WHERE MATCH ...
...
would be the way to search them all in one pass.

Caveat: the "relevance" (if you are thinking of using that) in one table does not compare to the relevance in another table. That is, this won't be meaningful:
(
SELECT ... MATCH... as relevance FROM db1.tbl WHERE MATCH ...
UNION ALL
SELECT ... MATCH... as relevance FROM db2.tbl WHERE MATCH ...
) ORDER BY relevance DESC

Consider getting another hosting service; it might be simpler.