I am building an asp.net apartment rental website. Currently, I do not utilize any membership functionality so there is no need to create long-term users, manage profiles or any extensive user related data.
I, however, have a separate database that contain tables for (Units, Locations, Tags..etc) with a simple User table that contain the following three field: name, email and phone#. Note that when the offer of the unit has expired then the created user will be deleted form the database.
Putting scalability and best practice in prospective, should I create ALL the tables in one giant database (ex: in the ASPNETDB if I want to use the default asp.net membership provider) or should I keep the membership database separate from the apartment-related database?
No reason not to have it all in a single database - less maintenance over the long term.