I’m planning to make a chat application. But the problem is that there can be billions of records since there will be lots of chat messages.

I have come up with the idea to make separate tables for each conversions, and that would make millions of tables. Or Should I add them to a single table? Which makes tens of billions of records in a single table?

I’m also thinking about distributing each conversation between different servers.

Which of these would be an appropriate solution? Please feel free to guide if I’m doing this wrong! I can consider different database methodologies as well (like NoSQL).