[thelist] pretty databases vs. fast databases

Mike Migurski mike at saturn5.com
Mon Mar 10 09:02:00 CST 2003


>> 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.
>
>Yup. that's the publishing system that I eluded to at the bottom of the
>post. I'd love to have a system that output XML files + transformations
>each time a "save" was done. Then visitors would pick up the correctly
>transformed file. (The "raw" XML files could be used for content
>syndication/distributed archives/etc.)

This may not help you very much - I haven't done any performance checks
myself, but I suspect that incurring the overhead of XML-parsing may be
just as slow, in the long run, as doing the DB query uncached.

If you're using PHP, your best bet is to use the serialize/unserialize
function pair, to store and retrieve string representations of native PHP
nested arrays. This has been tested, and the performance improvement on a
heavily-used server is huge.

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