Lord Loh. writes: > How on earth does US Social Security dept. maintain so many records ? > Google has 1 billion pages and qurys in a few milliseconds...
Weel, I work as a consultant on development of a similar system for Italian Government. (instead of Social Security numbers it handles all territoric matters and related payments, ownershipd to it... etc ...). BTW: software is interfaced via PHP. In this database, we have over a few billions of records in some few thousands databases hosted on some few hundreds servers physically located in some few dozens of regions of Italy. We use Oracle for it. And, neigher Oracle does magic here. The system is deeply thought and organized in all its details. Nothing is left for "a case" and everything is very well monitored and backed up. (not mentioning the synchronization methods). In my experience, mySQL has always failed performance-wise (when not crashed complitely) while trying to keep on a database consisting of 1.000.000+ records. For large DBs I would reccomend you PostgreSQL as it has, in my own opinion (and not to start a new thread here) a better ralational mechanism, which is crucial (as Manuel mentioned) to design the right logic within your application. TIP: look for repeating data in your DB, and try to "compress" it somehow. Try to see if you can split and reuse the records. Add more supporting tables and so on.... Maxim Maletsky PHP Beginner (www.phpbeginner.com) -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php