My personal opinion is that Interbase is in a position to be the most
powerful OpenSource RDBMS software--if it ever becomes an OpenSource RDBMS.
But I will not use it until it's an actual OpenSource product. Right now,
it's a binary-only in-limbo distribution. Really pathetic...you'd think in
6 months they'd have hammered **something** out so we could see the source.
Until we can really check out Interbase, the "next best thing" IMHO is
PostgreSQL. I must say, though, that if the Interbase developers (and just
who are these people?) don't watch out and speed things up a bit, Postgres
is in a position where it could seriously trounce the currently fictional
OpenSource Interbase. The Postgres team is working nothing short of
miracles lately. Everybody knows the limitations of Postgres...and the
development team seems to be eradicating them like a raging wildfire clears
away brush.
But none of this should be taken as being "against" MySQL! MySQL has
gotten a newfound influx of help with the Andover.net(?) group working with
them. The limitations of MySQL will soon be programmed out of existence.
They've finally gone GPL. MySQL already had the raw speed advantage, and
it already has some facilities built in for database replication. It is
far more advanced than even I like to give it credit for. I must admit
that it is kind of fun, though, to harp on its (soon-to-be former) lack of
subquery support.
If you've reached a point where MySQL cannot handle your data, you might
need to consult with someone to analyze your needs and current situation.
It could be, as you suggest, your app. It could be server MySQL runs on.
It could be the network (if your web server is not the same machine as the
one that houses your database). It could be so many things...
There are some obvious and sometimes not-so-obvious techniques that you
might use to at least extend the life of your current system while you
revisit your choice of RDBMS platform. An extremely simple example is
generating infrequently changing pages. Another fairly simple example
(which applies only if your web server is not the same machine as your
database host) is to keep infrequently changing data on the web hosts
themselves. Why make a call to the database over the network for a list
of, for example, the 50 states that make up the United States?
My suggestion in any case would be to try to analyze your app to see what
kinds of things are either 1) expensive operations unnecessarily done over
and over again or 2) amazingly time consuming. Work out solutions to
those. You may find that MySQL will be more than capable of handling the
remainder of your app. When you're positive your app is not the culprit,
then look into OS/DBMS/HTTP Server platform, networking, and hardware issues.
Doug
Thank you very much for your answer. This was about what I needed to hear.
My Hardware I think is good (a 350 Mhz RaQ3 running MySQL 2.23.10 and Apache 1.3..).
So, I will look a bit deeper inside some good books, and hopefully bring my programming to an advanced level.
Thanx,
Alex
--
___________________________
Alexander Lohse
Human Touch Medienproduktion GmbH
Am See 1
17440 Klein Jasedow
Tel: (038374) 75211
Fax: (038374) 75223
eMail: al@humantouch.de
http://www.humantouch.de