Large record count

[Ike]

I have a client who wants me to take on a project wherein they have, on
another table in another DB, about 1.2 million records. I am going to have
to consider, in this project, a record length of about 200 bytes, and am
wondering if MYSQL (5.x, on a first-rate Windows server) can handle such
size. Does anyone have experience with something that large? Thanks, Ike

[Markus Popp]

There's no doubt that MySQL itself has no problem with this amount of data.
Of course, whether it works (fast) depends on a good database design (e.g.
correct indexing) and that the hardware meets the requirements.

There are in fact people who complain that MySQL cannot handle a large
amount of data. But the true reason is almost always that something's wrong
with design, hardware etc.

The performence would probably be better on a Linux server, as MySQL is
better optimized for Linux than for Windows. However, if hardware and
database design are correct, it should work on Windows, too.

Markus

[bstjean]

It should be no problem at all but, as always, every problem is so
specific we'd need more details about what you'll do with this data:
mostly updates, inserts, selects, etc? How many concurrent users, etc?

I used to work at a place where we had a few tables in the 10+ million
rows with rows averaging 175 bytes if I recall correctly. Most of the
queries were selects.

I am now working on a table with 2.2 million rows of size 204 bytes and
mostly doing selects against it. Other tables are insert-select-delete
(barely serving as messaging queues) which are pruned every minute.

Every project is specific and, the easy answer is you can do anything
as long as you have a good design, proper indexing and good hardware.
More details about what you want to do would probably give us a chance
to better estimate your possible bottlenecks/problems.

You usually have problems when you have queries not based on the PK
(thus something doing table scans, file sorts, group by, etc), lots of
joins (especially outer joins) or have lock contention because of many
concurrent users...