Re: Re: Subject: Large PHP/Database driven site & scalability

On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Eric Peters wrote: > from a developement standpoint I definately need to figure out how I can > get tables with 100,000 entries in them rather than several million (or > even several hundred million) Several hundred million is a *lot*! I don't know what you are doing, but chances are good that you won't be running into that many unless you are not archiving old data. As for several million, most database servers should be able to handle that okay. Having 100,000 rows vs 1,000,000 rows isn't as important as having good indexes and querying based on those, returning only necessary records and only necessary columns. You normalize the db correctly and use proper datatypes, you shouldn't have any problems with the good database servers on the market, including some of the free ones. Of course, there are dozens of other variables, such as hardward, security, blah, blah, blah. Undoubtedly you've gone over all of this many times already, though. > the problem with just replicating data and having a server pool is the > sheer size of these tables - It just takes too long for an sql server to > query 100 million rows when i could split a table up (sometimes) into > susinct parts If properly setup, you won't be going through all of those rows (though 100 million is a lot for any table). If you use indexes correctly, you should be able to greatly improve how the queries are run. Hans Anderson ~ me@hansanderson.com PO Box 426, Missoula, MT 59806 | PHP, Search Engines, SQL (800)397-9116 / (406)549-6524 | Databases, Flash Multimedia, http://www.hansanderson.com | Killer Audio Production, http://www.goofiness.com | Minty Fresh Breath.