Right now I have more than 2000 entries in 12 seperate tables (entries sorted into categories)

The purpose of me making 12 tables instead of 1 giant one was because I was told it was faster to bring up all entries in a table instead of sorting through them. I know that is probably true but on what scale?

Even if I get up to 10,000 entries will it make the pages load that much faster? It would make it a lot easier to sort entries and do things with if they were all in one table.

Thanks in advance!
Stephen

absolutely no idea!

It will depend on how the database and tables are structured, simply having the items in seperate tables according to category may actually slow the queries down.

The process is called normalisation and works well if some thought is given to the structure and how to reduce data redundancy and table relationships.

Do you think it would make that much of a difference? Or are we talking to the point where its not very noticable. Like I said its not like I have millions of entries.

If each page only makes 1 query then it may not be evident, but it depends on so many other things.

SQL servers are good at optimising how query queues are handled when using join / union queries but with a single monolithic table query it has to be executed at one shot so may be backing up other queries. Also the query construction can make huge differences as well.
For example;
A "SELECT * FROM" could take 30 to 50% longer to execute than a "SELECT fieldlist FROM" simply because the field wildcard (*) means that the table has to be read twice, once to get the field names, and again to get the data from each column.
Another consideration for monolithic vs normalised tables is the data redundancy and how it affects things, such as the storage and the transfer time between SQL server and webserver.
Consider the point of 20,000 records and if each record contains 50 characters of redundant data, that's 1,000,000 characters to be needlessly recovered and transferred. It's also 1,000,000 characters to be stored taking up valuable disk space.
Gaining 40 to 70% speed increases by normalising the structures and optimising queries is not unusual.

Unfortunately too few "developers" understand the DBA side of web development and simply follow the basic SQL tutorials without really understanding the implications of a simplistic design on the code they are developing and you then end up with a system that does not scale up well and performance will degrade rapidly once the system is put under any kind of serious load.