> handling from 3M to 20M records/day with potentially a lot > of processing, live inserts/ updates etc.
How many records do you forsee? (There are some things to look up in the manual to give MySQL a hint at the total size of the table so it can start using longer internal pointers.) How big are the records? What kind of processing? Are you separating your transactional system from the reporting system? What is the pattern of use of the records? Unfortunately, your information is not enough to go on. For example, we do 200,000,000+ queries a day and barely break a load of 1.00 on Linux. But we have had a lot of time to optimize things. > 3) Are there any guidelines in estimating more presicely what > hardware I will need? Will your application we processor or disk based? I'd guess disk based, so get lots of RAM (fast RAM -- like DDR or whatever), and as many fast disks as you can afford and stripe them. Personally, I built our machine from parts at Frys Electronics. I think you could put something together for a reasonable amount of money. Do note, it has been my experience that hardware costs are inversely exponentially proportional to the optimization of the database structure and queries. Fully normalizing and then selectively denormalizing will huge differences in throughput. As will optimizing queries. (Specifically to the database in use helps tons too.) > 4) I cannot foresee all the possible growth, nor will the initial budget be > huge. Is it then woth planning for building out / clustering for some > redunacy and some load balancing upfront Other people can tell you more about replication and how it is different from clustering or load balancing. And you can use it for backup in a way too. It depends on your requirements though. If things are partitionable, then some thinking about that upfront will do you a world of good later. Depend on your application though. > 7) I'd also appreciate any input from people who have used > official mysql support before. We have used their support and it was excellent. Sincerely, Steven Roussey http://Network54.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php