Revisiting the database

[Terry]

On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, you wrote:
> Folks,
> I have a fair amount of experience working with databases of all kinds
> now.  My latest installation of SuSE 6.4 auto-installed MySQL and Webmin
> to administer it and a bunch of other stuff.
..
..
..
> 
> As for performance, nowadays a majority of users are running 400 MHz or

Is this observation from personal experience or have you managed to query a
majority of users?  I haven't managed to query a majority, but of the users I do
know, none has anywhere near this level by a factor of at least 2 and that
lucky soul was just the latest to update his 8 year old computer. I think you
are being verrrrrrrry optimistic about your assumptions of the financial
resources of the majority of users and their willlingness to chase the latest
and greatest from Intel.

I do think think your observations about an external, commonly used DB are
correct though.


> better machines.  A fast database could perform almost any query
> imaginable for this application in one or two seconds, even for
> accounting systems with thousands of records.  Using MySQL I have run a
> variety of queries including summing data from 100,000 rows of data that
> still run fast enough to be almost invisible to the user.  Some
> databases slow down on complex joins, but that would be necessary only
> on annual reports and similar problems.
>