MySQL database size - how big before scripts can't cope?

[Crazy_Fool]

does anyone have any trouble with PHP and very large MySQL databases? i'm planning to have some 100,000 sets of contact details (name, address, email, phone etc), plus 25,000 products in a catalogue, plus storage of up to 100 pre-ordered items per customer (kind of like a shopping list).

is there a limit at which PHP / MySQL will break?

[Gibble]

that's still a small database, it shouldn't be a problem

[jatar_k]

depends on what you do with it, if you try to select and display all of those products on one page you could have a problem. ;)

Doesn't seem too large, I think the space allowed for mysql on the server has been my main source of problems. Try not to load too much at once and you should be fine.

I have one that is probably 5 or 6 times the size of that with a lot of info per row and it works perfectly.

[lorax]

If you stop in at MySQL features page [mysql.com] you will learn:

We are using MySQL Server with some databases that contain 50 million records and we know of users that use MySQL Server with 60,000 tables and about 5,000,000,000 rows.

[Crazy_Fool]

thanks for the reassurance guys. i've built a lot of systems that could potentially be huge, but once i complete development, i rarely go back to see how much data goes into those databases. i guess that zero complaints so far means everything's ok.

>>If you stop in at MySQL features page you will learn:

alas, microsoft claim (or at least they used to claim) that access could cope with 1Gb of data and 256 concurrent users, but many people complain that their systems fall over with just a handful of concurrent users. i've never actually had failures due to the number of concurrent users or the amount of data and i tend to put such complaints down as coding errors. however, having read so many complaints about it, i'm having doubts and doublechecking all set ups.

[toadhall]

Has anyone here ever used LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) for this sort of job? I've read up on it, I'm intrigued by it, but I've never developed with it.

[openldap.org ]

[php.net ]

[lorax]

toadhall,
I haven't looked into LDAP as of yet but it is on my list as well. I think it may prove very useful in the XML apps I'm working out right now.

[danec]

I've never had any trouble at all with databases in excess of 1 million records. MySQl is *very* robust.

[ggrot]

Currently running a mySQL database averaging 103 queries per second on a database which contains tables with a little over a million records, and is the queries include multi-row, *sorted* results. Granted, designing indexes correctly is important here, and I did have to adjust the mySQL server parameters to give it more RAM than the default, but it runs quite nicely.

[lorax]

... designing indexes correctly is important here

Very true as is proper database layout. A poorly designed table/field structure can kill efficiency.