Best practice for storing very large amount of data in database table

Using: LAMP (PHP5, MYSQL 5+/MyISAM)

I am consuming a lot of data from a number of different feeds. There could be hundreds or thousands+ of records on any given day.

The data will be searchable and frequently will be.

Is it safe/optimal to house the data in one table with related 开发者_开发知识库data for categories in a different table?

Someone, who I respect, has the opinion to create tables for each category of the data and house the data in respective tables.

---

If you don't need to compare data across different categories, then storing in separate tables will improve performance. However, you might want to look at using partitions. This will allow you to manage storage of each category separately while keeping them in the same table.