Re: Database Question!

> I am going to develop a site that involved around 40 Million records ... >if PHP is very good then, what kind of back end >database will work very well for this amount of data and with PHP? Others have recommended Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Virtuoso etc. These are all good solutions, but you should be aware that you will need heavy duty hardware, a big budget for licencing, and lots of high end skills for day-to-day tuning and administration. As someone suggested, MySQL was written to handle large data sets quickly. It is free, of course, and much easier to administer - there is an excellent book called "MySQL" by DuBois that will tell you all you need to know. But in many situations it will not offer enough reliability, as it (famously) lacks transactions, and may not recover well from hangs, crashes etc. For my own project I have been investigating a little known Danish product - FrontBase http://www.frontbase.com. This is a sophisticated dataserver that claims to offer; optimised handling of very large data sets, embedded style crash recovery and ease of maintenance, rapid performance, very good compliance with the SQL-92 standard, and a number of scalability features. It is available for a wide range of platforms. Best of all, they offer a very reasonable and affordable licencing scheme, with free development licences - most databases such as Velocis that offer these features will cost many times more. There is a PHP interface available from the FrontBase site. I have been getting good feedback about the product and the customer service from current users, and I have been impressed by their response to my own questions. The company has been around for years - I first saw their product on NextStep. Although their website and documentation are a bit on the basic side (they claim to be addressing this), they have just had a large injection of capital and seem to have a secure future. Well worth checking out if you are looking for an economical solution. Hope this is of use Geoff Caplan British Goldsmiths