Big database and how to proceed

I'm working on a website running ASP.NET with MSSQL Database. I realized, that the number of rows in several tables can be very high (possibly someth开发者_Go百科ing like hundread million rows). I thnik, that this would make the website run very slowly, am I right?

How should I proceed? Should I base it on a multidatabase system, so that users will be separated in different databases and each of the databases will be smaller? Or is there a different, more effective and easier approach?

Thank you for your help.

Oded's comment is a good starting point and you may be able to just stop there.

Start by indexing properly and only returning relevant results sets. Consider archiving unused data (or rarely accessed data

However if it isn't Partioning or Sharding is your next step. This is better than a "multidatabase" solution because your logical entities remain intact.

Finally if that doesn't work you could introduce caching. Jesper Mortensen gives a nice summary of the options that are out there for SQL Server

• Sharedcache -- open source, mature.

• Appfabric -- from Microsoft, quite mature despite being "late beta".

• NCache -- commercial, I don't know much about it.

• StateServer and family -- commercial, mature.

Try partitioning the data. This should make each query faster and the website shouldn't be as slow

I don't know what kind of data you'll be displaying, but try to give users the option to filter it. As someone had already commented, partitioned data will make everything faster.