[kingu]

Having a database of nearly 300,000 items, it is becoming a maze of kludges to keep it barely functional, mostly because our database provider is using MySQL, and updating 300,000 items would occupy multiple servers for the better part of two days to accomplish it, an impossible task for a system that needs to respond in real world time.

So rather than update, patches are applied to the output to make changes when served. And it's working ok for the moment, but it is swiftly reaching the horizon of functionality. At a growth rate of 52,000 items a year, we've at most two years left of the database before it becomes impossibly bogged down, without throwing extensive hardware at the problem.

And we're a tiny company of just ten people.

[gura]

I manage a Informix database of up to 1.5 million items, with large associated blob items, and it runs like a charm on a modest HP Unix server.

Makes me wonder about the tiny little MySQL stuff I play with on the side.

[stylin_geek]

Does the company you work for understand that fixing this problem cannot wait until the system breaks? That it takes time to move stuff over to a more robust system?

I ask, because I’ve been in a similar situation and the company wouldn’t listen when I told them they need to pay attention and starting looking at upgrades now, rather than at the last minute.