If you provide your current solution and what problems you are encountering, you will receive a better response.

This forum is not known for doing your work for you.

Are you repeating content? (Submitted by, Completed by, Approved by)

Normalization usually relates to multiple tables and duplication of data.

I would look at your "by", "comments" and any...

Those are not "headers," they are columns.

Do you know what Normalization means in a database setting?

I would work on normalizing the tables first and then worry about the queries, forms, etc.

Two tables.

Table1 is simply Color Names and Type.


create table Colors (
id int not null
,name varchar(16) not null
,system tinyint not null
)

Those requirements are a mixture of data and presentation. You listed the requirements for a web application, not the database back-end.

And I would give serious consideration to the 'ad-hoc...

Many to Many.

Tables:
Posts (id, title, text, etc)
Tags (id, name, description, etc)
PostsTags (postsid, tagsid)

There is no need to give each user their own table. 10,000 users would mean 10,000 tables. That sounds ugly to manage.

Also, big tables are nothing to fear. Proper indexing and crafted queries can...

I would also move pending_ tables into a column within the user table, with values 0 or 1. This is assuming the pending_ tables do not have any additional columns.