I want to have several different domains running off one sme server. I have built the ibays and want to know do I need a seperate mysql database for each instance of joomla running for each site.
I'm looking at installing 12 seperate domains with seperate domains.
Yes unless you want all 12 sites to have the same content.
You can name them joomla1, joomla2, etc. or my preferred way is joomla-firstibayname, joomla-secondibayname, etc. This way you won't get them mixed up.
Then you need to input the correct db name during the joomla setup or manually put it in the correct config file in your joomla application directory.
You can however only have one user/password with access to all 12 databases if you want.