Okay, so here it is. I am mainly a marketing person and not the best developer myself, but I know how to program to get the job done. My main question here is how many tables would you (a seasoned programmer) use for this application. Application Summary: This is going to be a Client Center for our Marketing clients. Once they pay for the services they are going to be able to login through the panel and view/pay their invoices if any are open. View and track their project, as well as view their SEO rankings in a LIVE Updated setting. Now, all the account information, project information, as well as invoice data is going to be store in our ZOHO system , as we use Zoho for our CRM, Invoicing, as well as Project Management, so we are going to be using the ZOho CRM, Projects and Invoice API. So I personally was thinking that the only thing that should be really stored in the database for the user is their Username and Password, as when they create their account information it is going to create an account in Zoho CRM, so it will be stored there on their system not on our. The Keywords are going to be custom fields in the Account Information for Zoho, so I am thinking really only things as far as database is going to be concern is going ot be User information, like their login and persona information, as the rest is going to be pulled on the fly from the CRM database, but I want you to letme know as you are a better programmers than I am.
You first need to know exactly what data is being stored already, and how it's stored (what data in which tables, linked how) and what additional data you're going to need. Without that information laid out, you're not ready to design your database structure.
So many things need to be considered before you can ask "how many tables" and in most cases the raw count of tables is irrelevant. Consider the invoicing requirement * An invoice includes more than one billing item? * An invoice can be paid in installments? * A payment can cover several invoices? A tiny segment of your project but the answers can make radical differences. If you are trying to keep it really simple you can limit the number of tables but sometimes its best to include the table structure and build the gui to appear simple and then in the future you can give an extended page for those users who need it.
The general rule would be that the only things to be stored in YOUR data base would be the things that are not or should not be stored in the ZOHO database.