[thelist] Very Large MySQL Table

[Chris Anderson]

> But what I am wondering now is how do DNS's work? Unless I am
> mistaken, when I request evolt.org in my browser, it goes to my local
> DNS who looks up that domain name and then directs my request to the
> correct server. Even if you will say that more commonly requested
> domain names are cached, I have never (ever) had more than an
> instant's delay going to any site I have ever visited, aside from the
> occasional slow site which I always attributed to the host of that
> site.
> 
> How do these machines do these lookups so fast? And I presume they're
> high-traffic machines as well, generally speaking. Perhaps I am
> misunderstanding how they work.

They are not doing any inter-word searches for starters!

If all you want to do is look if a domain name exists (and you are not
looking for part of a name), then a simple binary search on a flat file
will be MUCH quicker than a relational database - it could probably
complete before the RDBMS had compiled the query plan

What kind if queries did you want to run ?

Chris