On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 09:13:12AM +0000, Timwi wrote:
Ivo Köthnig wrote:
I think the bottleneck is using a database mangement system (here mysql). So my question is: What is the advantage of using it? [...] For me it always looks as we use the database just to use the database. So again: where is the advantage?
- easy backup
- easy construction of queries (SQL)
- flexibility with construction of *new* queries that we haven't thought of before
- don't (well, shouldn't) need to update hundreds of data structures upon every edit
- databases are designed to do this sort of thing (esp. indexing)
There are probably *loads* more.
Mirroring is the biggest *disadvantage* of MySQL solution. UseMod wikis are extremely easy to efficiently mirror via rsync, and it was done with Phase I too. It was even easy to mirror it in "almost real-time" (like once an hour or so) over very small pipe (I did mirror Polish Wikipedia like that on 115kbit/s, and it took only small part of my bandwidth).
MySQL can only produce full dumps, and they are huge, take lot of time to generate, and lot of time to import at the mirroring site.
As far as queries are concerned, you can see it yourself on the Special Pages - most of the queries are turned off for performance reasons, so that's not really a good argument.
And we need to update the data structures all the time for performance reasons.