Managing Large Amounts of Data

[FuZion]

Hi there,

I am in the planning stages of a website that will eventually process thousands of database transactions per day. Now, I know that the data tables can only hold so many rows/so much info. So, what is the best way to keep this data organized across tables and across databases? Should I have multiple servers? If so, I'm assuming I would use PHP to keep everything organized. My idea was to have a master database containing the locations of every other piece of info. PHP would pull the location from the master DB and then pull the actual info, but this seems time consuming from a execution standpoint.

What is the best way to do this?

Thank you for your help!