**The decision does not depend on the number of columns you already have**, but on whether those 5 columns do _belong_ to what you are trying to model. There is no rule that says: "if you have 10 columns, keep in same table; use a separate table when you reach 36 columns". If those 5 columns are like a person's street, town, region, country, then no; they should be on a separate table "location" or similar. If those 5 columns are like a person's 1st name, last name, 2nd last name, ID-number, and email address, then they should probably be there. However, if your table already has 35 columns, then you probably haven't done much normalization to begin with and it looks like you're just stuffing everything on that table...