I'm trying to find information on database web hosting for a consulting client. It appears mysql and SQL 2000 are the most supported database platform.

I only found one web host for Oracle 8i on a Sun Solaris platform
Verio - http://hosting.verio.com/index.php/application.html

I have found several web hosts with these databases:
Unix - mysql, pgsql
Windows - access, mysql, sql server 7, sql server 2000

Does anyone host Sybase, DB2, Informix or any other databases not listed?

I do not need a web host until the decision is made on the database. If you cannot respond here because you are a web host, then please PM.

I would like to respond as a web host - but I think I'll take this one personally.

Going to software that isn't well used and supported is not usually a good idea. I would recommend that you only consider software packages like MySQL or PostreSQL. These are open source packages that are tried tested an true. As an alternative you can go to commercial packages which cost a lot more to purchase and to implement on, nevermind support. In <<MY PERSONAL OPINION>> (no flames please) stay away from the MS SQL server products and go with MySQL (with transactions enabled if you need them) or PostgreSQL.

No matter which database server you end up using, it is very important that you understand SQL transactions and the reasons why you need them.

MySQL is far superior to PostgreSQL as far as ease of administration, usage, and supported application reliability. My only problem with Microsoft products is the fact that it's closed-source. I know Microsoft has to make money; so do I. With this said, I cannot trust my servers to run something 24/7 without being able to see its workings and apply the necessary additions, subtractions, and patches in a timely manner. It is simply not a feasible situation to put my network in. I also cannot wait for Microsoft technicians to diagnose software problems for us when we have our own staff who do nothing but that. If we brought in the MCSE guys, we wouldn't be online; we'd be at Best Buy picking up software.

In terms of shared plans, MySQL is the most common among Unix environments, and considering it's free, a darn solid dbase. I believe it is what is used to power these boards.

It's nothing like Oracle or MS SQL Server in terms of strength and "back office" features, but you pay more for those two.

If any dbase is ODBC compliant, such as FoxPro for example, then it can be supported on most any windows server.

It's like Ford and Chevy on race day - if your developer is an ASP developer they will want MS SQL, or perhaps even MS Access, and if they are a php developer they will most likely want MySQL.

Good luck with the project.

My only concerns with mysql is the number of concurrent users and the database size. I need more concrete info on mysql to consider it for this large project. I can easily find out those limits, but what has anyone actually used in real life on mysql?

For example I have used SQL Server with 1000 users and 45 gig of data in a production environment. I have heard that Oracle will handle this without a problem.

I'm sure I am going to get flamed to death here - and I do not know the hard figures for MySQL's capacity, but I will say this...

You won't find it used a whole heck of a lot on enterprise level applications. That's not to say that it's not a workhorse, or a darn good dbase, but most sr level developers are going to prefer something like Oracle or SQL.

To save some pesos, unless you are sure your traffic will be that big right out of the gate is consider using MS Access being ready to migrate to SQL Server when traffic starts climbing. Typically this is an easy upgrade. I've never done a MySQL port so I cannot speak for that.

OK - here come the flames from the MySQL gurus! :)

We run MySQL and only MySQL - I can't give any benchmarks of it against anything else for this reason. I can tell you some info on what we have on one of our MySQL servers (a fairly popular one in our terms.)

Databases: 230
Total Tables: 3681
Total Data Size: >2.6 Gigs, < 3.

Its fairly small as we split our databases over four servers, and I cant give stats on anything larger than that since I don't have anything more.

MySQL runs very smoothly, and is the choice of most for a database server. In my opinion it is the best, and even better because of its opensourceness.

I sleep at night knowing my servers are running MySQL.

refcom

thanks.. thats the type of information i am looking for on mysql.

I would like to see if anyone has used a larger database 30 gig+ on a single dedicated mysql server.

Any other databases not mentioned supported?

Note: that Verio states that it puts up the Oracle server and you need a DBA to support it. It keeps them in an unmanaged database server environment. That's ok in my case since the client has DBA's to run the database. Just no web experience. For $250 a month to try Oracle at Verio sure a cheap way to test Oracle. Of cource mysql and SQL Server would be alot cheaper per month to test.

I haven't really noticed other web hosts offering a full server for database only use. Or am I missing that somewhere on the web host sites?

lpguitars

yes Oracle and SQL Server are preferred by the client, but I would like some real input from web hosts or users running large databases on the web using mysql or other databases.

If the largest database size on a single server is not close to 30 gig+, then its hard to recommend mysql as a valid choice in the long run. Of course it may be the perfect database for the next 2 years - the costs savings alone by using mysql could be substantial.

Hey markcw - I just did a search on google groups (not to steer you away from here) for "how large can mysql be" (no quotes) and got lots of replies from folks with millions of records and rows and with dbases larger than 3GB.

Might be worth checking out.

lpguitars

ok thanks for the tip. I forgot about looking at groups.google.com there.

Looks like some versions of linux / unix support files only 2-3 gigs in size. Newer versions are more flexible in max file size.

It looks like it will be a slippery slope to determine the hardware and software total costs on all platforms. If it were easy, I wouldn't need to be around!

I notice that **********.com supply Oracle as an addition to their hosting plans at $60/month. I've no connection with them at all, have never used them or know anything about them other than from their web site.

Perhaps that wasn't a good suggestion - looks like they are banned, or something. Sorry!

Perhaps that wasn't a good suggestion - looks like they are banned, or something. Sorry!

This link http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Table_size.html gives maximum table sizes for MySQL. (Note, table size, not database size).

As you can see, there's nothing anywhere like 30Gb. My hunch would be that you could possibly get it to work, depending on the OS you were using and the file system, with some patches and tweaks...

But, and this is a big but IMHO, it seems to me that you would be pushing the envelope quite a bit over what MySQL is normally used for. I think it's a great product, but it is not the same thing as SQL Server, Oracle and IBM's DB2 (which is very highly regarded).

To compare figures for SQL Server see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/architec/8_ar_ts_8dbn.asp

For anything more than the average smallish databases that many websites use, you need a server dedicated to serving databases -- sticking a 30Gb database on a web server is heading for disaster I think! And the database server needs to be well specified -- for that size I wonder if you would be better off thinking about a server cluster (database and web servers)? Microsoft (yeah we love to hate them) have some good info and experience on that -- there have been interesting papers on it at past TechEd conferences (adding "medium cost" servers to a cluster is a whole lot better and cheaper than trying to upgrade one massive server). And you get a lot more resilience too. My guess is that this is a pretty important website?

What kind of load you generate will depend on whether you are just doing reads or writes too -- a database which is effectively read-only will perform much better. I believe it's common practice for busy website databases to try and limit updates to a slack period of the day to avoid slowing stuff down.

Stuff like SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 are designed from the start to support large databases.

The more I think about this, the more I believe you'd be well served (no pun intended) by talking to a specialist in large database-driven websites (and that's definitely not me, nor does my company do that kind of consultancy!). There's a whole ton of stuff you need to think about and the system needs to be planned as one coherent whole.

Email me if you want an idea of who -- a name is somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd need to do some hunting to dig it out!

Hope this helps.

TDMWeb,

Thanks for the ideas. I will need to investigate some local consulting companies to see how they have handled large databases on the web.

The only project I was remotely involved with a large database, we used msql to log transactions and then behind the firewall, applied the transactions to the real database.

Not sure if that will work in this specific case.

Originally posted by TDMWeb
This link http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Table_size.html gives maximum table sizes for MySQL. (Note, table size, not database size).

As you can see, there's nothing anywhere like 30Gb. My hunch would be that you could possibly get it to work, depending on the OS you were using and the file system, with some patches and tweaks...

But, and this is a big but IMHO, it seems to me that you would be pushing the envelope quite a bit over what MySQL is normally used for. I think it's a great product, but it is not the same thing as SQL Server, Oracle and IBM's DB2 (which is very highly regarded).



MySQL is powering Yahoo's finance webpages now. They have a PR about it at their website. The URL Is:

http://www.mysql.com/articles/us/yahoo_finance.html

Here is what the article says at the bottom:


Zawodny noted that key MySQL features such as replication and the ready-to-use APIs and libraries have also helped Yahoo! manage its demanding applications smoothly. With the integration of InnoDB into MySQL, Yahoo! is building some of its next-generation applications to take advantage of MySQL's transactions, row-level locking, and referential integrity.

Since Yahoo! Finance started using MySQL, the database's popularity has grown within the company, and many of Yahoo's other world-wide properties are now using MySQL too. "We have used MySQL far more than anyone expected," stated Zawodny. "We went from experimental to mission-critical in a couple of months. Once others saw it, they jumped on board."

Operating system used: FreeBSD and Linux, synchronized using MySQL Replication
Size of database: 25 GB
Average number of concurrent connections: 60
Max number of concurrent connections: 250


So there are MySQL databases running close to your 30 GB talked about above and people are very happy with the performance of the database server.

Hal

I've been looking at possible open source replacements for an Image database (Image is an enterprise level database that runs on HP3000s). I've looked at PostgreSQL and so far it looks promising in writing. I haven't done any actual testing with it yet, but it might be worth taking a look at. Here's a link to some information on database size limits http://www3.us.postgresql.org/users-lounge/limitations.html

Richard

hbouma

great article! thanks!

It's what i couldn't find on mysql to use as background for the reset of the project. It will hold quite a bit of weight.

Noldar

thanks for the web link.

I'm not sure why postgresql was not as popular as mysql.

Everything i have read so far seems to compare great with mysql.

But just as Sybase plays 2nd fiddle to SQL Server... so it is with postgresql.

I think MySQL and PostgreSQL are simply targeted at different user bases.

I found this article on why OpenACS chose PostgreSQL over MySQL. It's about 2 years old, but still interesting.

http://openacs.org/philosophy/why-not-mysql.html

Richard

Noldar - MySQL and PostreSQL have both changed a LOT in two years. I still recommend MySQL as a very viable option for any database. It IS highly regarded widely used software in almost all environments.

Microsofts products are closed-source. Therefore in any mission critical projects they can NOT be trusted by me. I will only run MS products on desktops, they are not suited to servers in my opinion.

What is the best way to find out? Test it. I don't have a system I can test 100 Gigs of mySQL data and try pushing 500 concurrent connections.... but it would be quite easy to script the test scripts and watch the results.

Originally posted by markcw
hbouma

great article! thanks!

It's what i couldn't find on mysql to use as background for the reset of the project. It will hold quite a bit of weight.

Another big article was done by PC Magazine in March that did benchmarks of SQL database engines (SQL Server, DB2, SyBase, Oracle 9i, and MySQL) MySQL and Oracle 9i were the leaders with MySQL trailing Oracle 9i by just a bit. Overall, they praised MySQL for its performance but gave it lower marks because it wasn't as friendly for enterprise customers.

The test database server was: "Each database server orchestrated an array of 24 9GB swappable disk drives—enough to support our substantial database. The disks were configured with RAID 5 (a high-availability specification for DBMSs). In a RAID 5 setup, the disks are mirrored and data is broken up, or striped, and written to all disks. A parity check is also performed to ensure data integrity."

The database had... "We had Nile request data from a test database containing 20 million product records and 5 million customer records."

You can read more about the article here:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,7570,00.asp

Hal

Originally posted by hbouma
MySQL and Oracle 9i were the leaders with MySQL trailing Oracle 9i by just a bit. Overall, they praised MySQL for its performance but gave it lower marks because it wasn't as friendly for enterprise customers.

Good article.

Your summary was a bit biased though. The scorecard showed that Oracle 9i was first and MySQL was last - after DB2, MSSQL, and Sybase.

If fact MySQL scored less than every other database in every area except performance where it was equal with Oracle9i and Sybase. In fact, I would probably go as far as to say its scoring was significantly lower than every other DB in this survey. It had the lowest score in the following areas:

Server Engine, and
Management Tools, and
Database Design, and
Programmability, and
Security, and
Interoperability, and
Data Analysis - didn't even score here.

I'm not knocking MySQL because it is a fast, cheap DB server, but this report seems to show that true RDMS systems are probably a better bet when it comes to mission-critical systems. Out-and-out performance isn't the only criteria by which to measure the viability of a system.

Even the dreaded MS SQL Server scored better on all points except it's efficiency in processing data requests. If the queries were run through stored procedures then the performance would probably have been greater.

Yes, I do prefer MS SQL Server. I would probably use Oracle if I could afford it but I find it a nightmare to work with when I have to. Never had any real exposure to Sysbase or DB2. I am thinking of giving MySQL a try for some clients and because of its pricing, but I still think that MS SQL Server is the best bet for ours, and the majority of our clients, needs.

Thought that I had better add that ALL of these system, except MySQL are, as far as I know, closed source. Closed source doesn't necessarily make something bad.

Hi,

I was using the review at PC Magazine to show that MySQL could perform well for large databases. That is what the thread was focusing on here so I was addressing that issue. But you are correct that when you look at other features outside of performance then MySQL doesn't hold up as well.

Hal

hbouma - Thanks again for the PC mag article. It changes the way I think about mysql but in a production enviroment it seems to lack the more robust utilities, etc. For this client, I think this may be ok for the first year or two.


PJamie - I'm a MCDBA so I can easily lean towards Microsoft but I am trying to look at the picture from afar and see what might database be a good solution for this client trying to get a web database online rather quickly.

I do appreciate all the comments on this topic!