How to handle maps, and how big can databases get?

[maxwellmu]

I'm in the beginning stages of designing my game. It will be a strategy game where players control cities which they develop to accrue resources in order to support armies, etc. The game will be played on a giant hex grid map. Each tile on the map can have a different terrain type which will affect troop movement speed, defense, etc.

I'm wondering how other games that have such a feature manage maps? Suppose I had a table in my database (thinking of using MySQL), with a row for each tile, which keeps track of the terrain type and what is at the location (army, city, etc.). This table would be very big. Even a 1000x1000 grid would take a million entries. I'm wondering what is the biggest a database can get before the size starts affecting performance issues? And what is the biggest it can get, period? Is there any other way to implement this? Thanks in advance.

[Sim]

ive heard of databases being like TB's

[codestryke]

Here is a thread you might be interested in
http://community.bbgamezone.net/index.php/topic,2406.0.html