[thelist] pretty databases vs. fast databases

[Erik Mattheis]

Even if the initial 100 users increases to 10,000 and each of those
10,000 views 5 pages in an 8 hour burst, that's still less than 2
queries per second. So unless the DB you're using is something worse
for the web than Access '97, the end user is going to see no
difference, even if you could reduce the processing time 4 fold (based
on my memory that I once had a quite long query, or rather a sequence
of five or six queries, to an Access '97 DB that took 250 milliseconds
to execute).

On the other hand, if handling a large load as best as possible is a
goal of the project, a non-normalized design might be the better way to
go ... unless your app is going to have to update the non-normalized
stuff quite a bit more than I'd assume given the names of the columns
in your queries.

Not that you asked the question, but a way to completely eliminate the
potential problem would be to write static files from the queries
instead of querying the DB with each request.

On Sunday, March 9, 2003, at 02:18  PM, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> Here's my question: how do people feel about "wrecking" database
> normalization and sticking (e.g.) author names into the meta_comments
> table in addition to the author ID. It would reduce the query by one
> join.
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Erik Mattheis
GoZz Digital
<http://goZz.com/>
Flash and ColdFusion Development
Minneapolis, MN
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