Fastest DB searching

[Anon]

Two things...

1. Exactly how much is too much for a MySQL DB? I'm talking about size. Would something on the lines of 50,000 rows each with 100 fields (most VarChar(10)) be out of line for MySQL?

2. Does the size of the fields effect the search times? Would an example like the following be of faster speed?

DB

id place

---

1 3
2 3
3 1

PHP

if place = 1 then print New York
if place = 2 then print Chicago
if place = 3 then print Orlando

I was thinking it would be faster because MySQL is processing way less info (just the one-diget numbers), and then the PHP converts them over to usable info.

[[deleted]]

from what I know mysql can handle much more than flat text files and is much faster. I guess if you stay under 5MB you should be fine!

[Anon]

I'd like a second opinion on Mark's comment of staying under 5mb. I haven't been able to find any info on the max safe size of a MySQL DB. If 5mb is in fact the case (my calculations show my DB could get up to 10mb), then I would be better off replacing the names with numbers in the DB, and then having PHP convert the numbers back to names I guess.

Mark wrote:

from what I know mysql can handle much more than flat text files and is much faster. I guess if you stay under 5MB you should be fine!

[[deleted]]

You can go higher then 5MB. I'm not sure how much higher you can go, but i'm sure you can go up to 10 or 20. After that you might want to use Oracle or something else I would think.

[sepodati]

The actual size limit on a database is based on your file system, not mysql. I think it is 2Gig for Linux, higher for other operating systems...

Now, this doesn't mean that I would use MySQL for a 2 Gig database. It depends on what you are doing and how much traffic you are going to have. MySQL is very fast for reads, but slow for inserts and updates. How is this data going to be used and how much traffic are you looking at? Give some more info and hopefully someone can help you decide what database to use...

---John Holmes...

[Anon]

We use MySQL for a 500mb+ database with aprox 800 queries / second. Not a single crash in over 8 months. Very Fast.