Re: What if 1,000 people access the database at one time?

Phil, To start with MySQL tables aren't sorted unless some type of maintenance is taking place, and many of those operations can be done on copies of the tables. Check http://www.mysql.com/doc/T/a/Table_maintenance.html for more information. Given that, I would expect the person maintaining the database would take it off line. The "sort" is handled by the way in which you use ORDER BY in your SELECT statement, so it doesn't affect the underlying table structure. MySQL is thread-safe, so different users can execute SELECT and UPDATE's simultaneously. A SELECT wouldn't affect an UPDATE. In terms of timeliness of UPDATEs and SELECTs, that's almost a non-issue as one cannot know in advance what will be updated or inserted. Regards - Miles Thompson At 10:22 AM 1/25/2002 -0500, Phil Schwarzmann wrote:

So let's say Bill is accessing a MySQL table and is about to UPDATE some information on a particular row. Meanwhile, Al is doing a sort on that same table. Couldn't Al's sorting possibly screw up Bill's updating?? Or does MySQL have some built in functions that prevent this? Thanks! Phil