Hi,

I am a student and I am doing a business plan for one of my classes. My project is an internet database . I am quite lost as I am a marketing student. If in the first year, I would have a database of roughly 5,000 records to ultimately in year 5 - having 60,000 records, what capacity would I need (including bandwidth) and how much traffic (in users per day perhaps) could it handle? I am sorry to post such a question like this but I really don't know who to ask (and the paper is due on Monday!)

Thank you very much for any assistance,

First you got to figure out what are you going to keep. Each database will have different requirements and of course the resulting size, bandwidth will differ. Example is keeping 5000 records of First_name of users and compare against keeping 5000 records of MP3 songs, titles and tracks.

You have to add up the size requirement of each record in the database and multiply by the number of records.

Example if you set each record to only keep the first name of every user. Each user can enter a maximum 30 characters, then te potential size of the database will be 5000x30 = 150,000 bytes. This is just an estimate and actual database size will be bigger because of other 'overheads'.

So if you want to keep a record of First name (30 characters), Last name (30 characters) and password (15 characters) then you need 30+30+15 = 75 characters per record. That would mean 5000x75 bytes required.

As for the bandwidth, you just ASSUME the number of visitors to the site. Example 10,000 visitors per day to the site and they have to login would mean you need 10,000 x 5000 x 75 bytes just to transfer the info to the browser. This is NOT inclusive of the bandwidth required to send the content and is a ROUGH estimates.

You need an ESTIMATE of the bandwidth and multiply it with a safety factor. You don't need the exact number because that you may need to consult a programmer friend who will ask you more about your site content, scripting, navigation etc

Is that info sufficient?

When I was in school, a lot of thing you have to ASSUME. Just put the assumption down, do the maths and you should be okay.

Thank you very much for your help. I really appreciated it.

Regards,