Need information concerning databases

[tonyp321]

I recently got an offering to do a ecommerse site. My problem is i dont have much experience with dynamic sites with a huge amount of clients logging in and searching hundreds of thousands of entries.

The site is going to start out small ruffly 30-100k entries but will need to be scalable. The site is going to be started in cold fusion fusebox style since it seemed the most stable for my prior sites.

So what i need to know is
Whats a good med-high level database server that is scalable

[zomega42]

mySQl, MS SQL server, or Oracle if it's really big

[SuperLite17]

I would highly recommend using MySQL. Microsoft's SQL server is the most popular, but it runs around $20,000.00 per server.

MySQL on the other hand is open source (free) and is more then robust enough for mission critical data. It's used by Yahoo, Nasa, etc.

[JonR28]

If your running through Cold Fusion I'd suggest M$ SQL. I know their evil but with enterprise tools and everything it works really great. MySQL is wonderful but a bit tricky for someone to develop with if you havn't been beyond Access.

Be careful about the design of your DB too. Try to keep verity searches to a minimum and certainly don't let them be spiderable. Cold Fusion has excellent caching support so try and build cacheble gateways for your databases using CFC's.

Read up on Cold Fusion Database Optimization and your client will be very very happy. Sites poorly designed with CF and SQL can lag when spiders hit.