A friend of mine and I want to create a site that administers organizational surveys. Currently on my own site I use MS FrontPage to create these and store results in MS Access. However, in creating this new site, we are worried about issues of size and scalability, and fear that MS Access will not do the job and would be bloated in its use of space in comparison to the number of records it can handle. We could go to Oracle or SQL 7, but these are extremely expensive options for someone who just wants to assure scalability.
Is MySQL capable of scaling? To what size and degree of complexity (beyond just flat files)? Is it more efficient at storage?
Also, there is the issue of compatibility - creating surveys and db's that others might put on their own servers. What would be the compatibility issues? Would XML come into play here?
First of all - have no fear - MySQL is far more scalable the MS Access. I believe Access starts choking if you have five users on it at the same time (e.g. five visitors to your site).
By contrast, the text you type is stored in MySQL - that's what's behind these forums. You'd only ever need to start worrying about MySQL when you start being the size of a company like Amazon.
As to compatibility - there's alot of people using MySQL but if you want people to be able to publish your surveys on other sites, you'd be best looking at "web services". You're right XML is the way to go.
Have a look at Kevin Yanks article of Web Services. Then check out XML-RPC. In Kevins article, where you read "SOAP", you could also have read XML-RPC - they are alternative standards for XML.
The basic concept here is;
1. Fill your MySQL database with surveys
2. Create an XML-RPC server (this is fairly easy now in PHP and ASP)
3. Create an XML-RPC client for your customers to access your surveys on their websites.
One more read: PHP and XML: Parsing RSS 1.0 - that's an older and more limited technology than XML-RPC but the article should help you understand the concepts involved here.
Originally posted by HarryF First of all - have no fear - MySQL is far more scalable the MS Access. I believe Access starts choking if you have five users on it at the same time (e.g. five visitors to your site).
By contrast, the text you type is stored in MySQL - that's what's behind these forums. You'd only ever need to start worrying about MySQL when you start being the size of a company like Amazon.
As to compatibility - there's alot of people using MySQL but if you want people to be able to publish your surveys on other sites, you'd be best looking at "web services". You're right XML is the way to go.
Have a look at Kevin Yanks article of Web Services. Then check out XML-RPC. In Kevins article, where you read "SOAP", you could also have read XML-RPC - they are alternative standards for XML.
The basic concept here is;
1. Fill your MySQL database with surveys
2. Create an XML-RPC server (this is fairly easy now in PHP and ASP)
3. Create an XML-RPC client for your customers to access your surveys on their websites.
One more read: PHP and XML: Parsing RSS 1.0 - that's an older and more limited technology than XML-RPC but the article should help you understand the concepts involved here.
Bookmarks